Sheldon Whitehouse's Climate Inquisition Continues by Paul Driessen

Senator Torquemada wants to jail those who dissent from his alarmist views on climate

Paul Driessen

Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass “manmade climate crisis” skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.

The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn’t change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.

He recently said Democrat control of the Senate would enable him and his colleagues to launch investigations, haul climate realists before committees (for star-chamber show trials), and even employ grand juries and criminal prosecutions – to intimidate, silence and punish climate crisis nonbelievers.

People could certainly conclude that the thin-skinned senator would feel right at home in Inquisition Spain, Stalinist Russia, Red Guard and Xi Jinping China, or book-burning pre-Holocaust fascist Europe. Their history of silencing dissenters, erasing them from history, and sending them off to gulags and salt mines (or worse) is legendary. Their economic and governing ideology is classic fascism:

an extreme, intolerant system, under which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries outright, but does dictate what they can make, do, sell and say – while controlling citizens’ thoughts, speech and choices – through intimidation, silencing, arrest, prosecution, and fear of being fined, jailed, fired, sent to penal or reeducation colonies, and being beaten or executed.

These tactics are reprehensible and dictatorial. They are un-American and anti-science. Indeed, science achieves no progress without dissent, discussion and debate. It requires not just hypotheses, theories and computer models, but solid, empirical evidence to confirm or disprove hypotheses, models and predictions.

Discussion, debate, dissent and evidence are especially vital in addressing the assertion that humanity faces an unprecedented manmade climate crisis. That assertion is being used to justify demands that the United States, Europe and [the] developed world eliminate the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of our energy, petrochemical and pharmaceutical raw materials, fertilizers and countless other benefits.

It is being used to justify demands that we replace this reliable, affordable energy and raw material base with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. Not only are these alternatives intermittent, weather-dependent and far more expensive. They involve extensive mining, land use, wildlife, pollution and other environmental impacts. They are not renewable, sustainable, environment-friendly or climate-safe.

In the United States alone, we would have to replace some 7.5 billion megawatt-hours of electricity and electricity-equivalent fossil fuel use per year; replace enormous amounts of oil and natural gas raw materials; and overhaul our transportation, home heating and other systems. That would require millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of 1000-pound battery modules, tens of millions of acres of corn, canola, soybean and other biofuel crops – and tens of trillions of dollars.

Democrat urban population and voter centers will likely oppose those industrial-scale installations in their backyards. They would have little objection to locating them in what many ruling, media and Hollywood elites imperiously and derisively refer to [as] “flyover country” – western, Midwestern and southern states.

This “transformation” – under the Paris climate treaty, a Green New Deal or a Biden-Harris regulatory program – would massively disrupt America’s economy, jobs, living standards, health and wellbeing, especially for poor, minority, blue-collar, fixed-income and flyover country families and communities.

Climate alarmists insist that any lost jobs would be replaced with “green” jobs. But those would be mostly minimum-wage positions: hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling, removing and landfilling turbines, panels and batteries. Moreover, most of those green technologies would be manufactured overseas, especially in China, because environmentalists battle any mining in the USA, and a climate-focused energy system would provide insufficient reliable, affordable power for factories.

Those huge and unprecedented amounts of mining and manufacturing would require fossil fuels. So the only thing that would change is where the fossil fuel use and emissions occur.

It would be mostly in Asia and Africa, in countries that are not obligated under the Paris climate treaty to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; countries that will build as many hundreds or thousands of coal and gas-fired power plants as needed to lift their people out of poverty  ... and make “green energy” technologies they will happily sell to America, Australia, Canada and Europe.

That means, even if the US went cold-turkey on fossil fuels, it would make no difference to global GHG emissions or global atmospheric concentrations. And that means, even if carbon dioxide is the primary factor in climate change, destroying US and other modern economies would bring no climate benefits.

The EU’s and UK’s unwavering belief in human-caused climate cataclysms is already hammering its industries, workers and families, as numerous articles attest: here, here, here and here, for instance.  

Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F.

Violent (F4-F5) US tornadoes have actually declined in number the past 35 years (1985-2020) versus the previous 35 years (1950-1984); and in 2018 not one F5 tornado touched down in the United States. For a record twelve years, from Wilma in 2005 until Harvey and Irma in 2017, no Category 3 to 5 hurricane struck the US mainland. Overall, there is little or no trend in tropical cyclone activity or intensity.

All that is not surprising in light of new research by Drs. William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden that strongly indicates even doubling carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in Earth’s atmosphere would have minuscule effects on global temperatures and climate (but would benefit plant growth).

Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish human influences from natural factors, fluctuations and cycles regarding temperatures, polar ice, storms and droughts. Some scientists certainly claim otherwise – and generally just blame humans. But they have little or no actual, empirical evidence to support their claims, predictions and models. They simply say the science is settled, and we must ban fossil fuels, so shut up.

With so much at stake for America and the world, this is completely intolerable. At the very least, those claiming we face a climate calamity must be required to present solid empirical evidence to support their assertions – and engage in in robust, transparent debates with manmade climate change skeptics.

That is precisely what Senator Torquemada seems determined to prevent and punish, while transforming “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a Russian Politburo or Chinese National People’s Congress – and an integral part of the $multi-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex.

In that quest he would certainly be aided by the Big Media and Big Tech moguls who share his views on climate change, silencing scientists and evidence that contradicts climate cataclysm catechism, and blacklisting “climate heretics” in government, academic and corporate circles. 

People have been conditioned to kowtow to government lockdown edicts, to save humanity from Covid. Climate alarmists assume we will now be sufficiently compliant about banning fossil fuels to “save the planet,” when we’re trying to recover from Covid. Or their Torquemadas will make us compliant.

It’s time to reject politicized junk science, demand debate, and resist green climate and energy edicts. Perhaps most of all, the US Senate must assert its Advice and Consent responsibilities on the Paris climate treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement Americans were ever asked to ratify.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

My Comment:  

Actually Americans were never asked to ratify the Paris Climate Treaty.  It was never put before them in a national referendum.  The Paris Climate Treaty was never put through the treaty approval process of our Constitution, which requires that two-thirds of the Senators present concur with a treaty negotiated by the President.  Obama knew he could not get Senate approval so he pretended the Paris Climate Treaty was not a treaty, but somehow was still binding upon Americans.  This was literally the act of a dictator.

Dr. Driessen said: "Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F."

The link is to the data Prof. John Christy presented to the Senate in December 2015 which showed that the computer models that claimed man-made global warming was a crisis were already predicting temperatures 0.5 K or °C higher than those actually measured.  0.5 K is 0.9 °F.  The alarmist computer models within just a few years are greatly exaggerating the temperature increase.  The exaggeration over several decades will be several times this amount.

There ought to be no tolerance for such fools as Senator Whitehouse who call for the suppression of the freedom of speech of Americans, including those who argue against catastrophic man-made global warming.  He is un-American in doing this and should be a massive embarrassment to the people of Rhode Island.  Unfortunately, the people of Rhode Island have long been inclined to vote for politicians approved by the Mafia and corrupt to their cores.  This, of course, means they vote for the corrupt undemocratic Democratic Socialist Party.

Black Education Tragedy is New - Walter E. Williams

 If you believe that the atrocious inner city educations that many black Americans receive today is due to the legacy of black slavery or due to systemic racial discrimination, then how do you explain the much greater success of inner city black schools of the past compared to today's government holding pens for blacks?  Read Prof. Walter E. Williams article Black Education Tragedy is New and gain a more rational perspective.

Seriously, do you really want to be ruled by the undemocratic Democratic Socialist Party?

This is one of many, many horror stories about the 2020 election.  When a party engages in such a fraud, you ought to be seriously asking yourself "What is it this cabal intends to do to me with this power it is seizing?"

Federal, state, and local governments demonstrate their incompetence in 2020 election

About half of all Americans have already recognized that the federal, state, and local governments have just demonstrated a serious and disastrous level of incompetence in managing the 2020 election.  A rational individual should recognize that this is a powerful argument against entrusting governments with such important tasks as education, health care, the regulation of work and production, and even charity.  In addition to the incompetence, this election proved the governments to have little commitment to morality.  They had no determination to carry out their duty in determining who the people had actually chosen to hold responsible positions in government.  In the case of the presidential contest, the people voted for Trump, while the government counters chose Biden.

Dictators everywhere have long understood that it is not who votes that matters, it is who counts the votes that matters.  George Soros and the Democratic Socialist Party worked very hard over the last four years to put themselves in position to be the vote counters and to develop the means to override the votes of legitimate voters.  They succeeded.  As Biden told us, he had the best vote fraud team that could be developed.

The 2020 Election was most likely stolen and is certainly illegitimate and unconstitutional

The 2020 election was a massively illegitimate election.  There was voter fraud on a large scale, but mostly there was fraud on the part of those hired to manage the election in political jurisdictions which have long been controlled by the Democratic Party -- now the Democratic Socialist Party.  This is the evolved party of slavery, the post-Civil War KKK, segregation and Jim Crow laws, President Woodrow Wilson's revived KKK, the socialism of the New Deal, the sloth and abject dependency of the Great Society programs, the envy and avarice that seeks to punish achievement, opposition to mankind's use of the resources of the Earth, forced government-school attendance without benefit of an education, forced subjugation to union organized crime and socialist thugs, discrimination against low cost of living and undereducated workers by means of a national minimum wage law, and of divisive group identity politics that among other evils embraces racism.  This party has always been eager to control the lives of others and very willing to do highly immoral acts to gain that power.  This party has always practiced coordinated and widespread acts or immorality to obtain the monopolist power of government to do harm to many Americans.

Subverting the will of the voters is just replacing the will of the Deplorables and those too dependent to manage their own lives with the will of the socialist elite.  That can't be bad, now can it?

The Democratic Party prevented Tea Party organizations from being recognized as tax-exempt organizations prior to the 2012 election by using the IRS for blatantly political purposes.  In the 2016 election they used the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the Russians, and the President and Vice President themselves to spy on the Trump campaign.  For most of the Trump administration they knowingly falsely accused Trump of collaboration with the Russians. Then they falsely claimed he was strong-arming the Ukrainian President for his own political benefit, ignoring the requirement that the President seek out and prosecute malfeasance in the Executive Branch, such as that of Joe Biden and his family working for foreign powers whose intention to hurt the interests of the USA is well-known.  Then Biden, the minion of the Chinese Communist Party, bought and paid for, claimed that Trump was responsible for every death caused by the Chinese Communist Party's release of the coronavirus into the world, which was actively aided by Biden.  Ever since they were surprised by Hillary Clinton's election loss in 2016, this party of evil has plotted ways to steal the 2020 election.

The Constitution says the election laws and processes are to be determined by the state legislatures, unless Congress intervenes.  Especially since Clinton's defeat in 2016, the Democrat Socialist Party has attempted to thwart the election laws of state legislatures by making changes in the voting process which are contrary to the laws of the state legislatures.  They have used the courts and state and local government officials to rule in favor of practices that are contrary to the state laws.  These changes sought by the Democrat Socialists have been consistently such that the validity of a ballot cannot be readily determined, or in many cases could never even possibly be determined.  In some states, the general mailings of unrequested ballots were not authorized by the state legislature.  In many cases, there was a requirement that the mailed-in ballots be verified by a signature check, which was not performed in many cases in any useful manner.  In many cases, many mail-in ballots were counted without benefit of observers.  Huge numbers of in-person ballots were also counted without adequate observer checks. There are analyses that show that hundreds of thousands of ballots were claimed to be counted in time-frames in which the counting machines available could only count a small fraction of that number.  There are many counties, especially those controlled by the Democratic Socialists, where the federal law requiring that the voter registration rolls be updated and accurate is disobeyed.  These voter registration rolls are filled with people dead and people who have moved away.  The Democrats have clearly been using these voter registration rolls to have the dead, the moved, the non-voting, and in many cases even the voting all vote for Democrats or at least for Biden.  Incredible numbers of ballots supposedly for Biden give a vote for Biden only, making it faster to submit many false ballots for him.  There are reports of mail-in ballots that were never folded, so they could not possibly have been mailed in as required inside two envelopes.  There are many indications that Democrat controlled areas simply threw out ballots for Trump, including military absentee ballots.  There are reports that ballots were substituted for Biden in the names of those whose Trump ballots were thrown out.  As a result, in many states the 2020 election was both unconstitutional and illegitimate.

Any election which a rational person believes to have been incapable of reliably determining the will of those who cast their ballot according to rational law established by their state legislature, is an illegitimate election.  There is very good reason to believe that a rational person cannot be sure what the election outcomes were in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  Because of that and the unconstitutional processes, the election results should not be certified in any of these states.  The state legislature then has to chose the electors for these states, since that is the constitutional requirement.  If these state legislatures want the will of the people to determine future presidential elections, or for that matter any state office elections, they must take responsibility to enforce election laws and assert their constitutional authority to prevent vote fraud and the unconstitutional changes of legislatively determined election practices.

It is critical that we invest the time and effort required to track down all of the violations of the state election laws.  We need to determine whether the people really wanted Trump or Biden to become President.  That knowledge is most likely available to us only after many months, and those state legislatures in the questionable states will have to make a choice before the will of the people is determined.  However, it is much more important to track down every law-breaker who has acted to keep the will of the people from being known and prosecute them to the very fullest extent of the law.  If we do not do this, the will of the people will never be known in future elections either.  We should be as diligent in tracking down the criminals who practice election fraud as we are murderers, rapists, and bank robbers.  Their prison sentences ought to be long, very long.  They are, in a most fundamental sense, traitors to the United States of America.

The courts will not provide a solution to the issue of who the legitimate voters actually voted for to become the next President.  The courts look at an iceberg and only allow what is seen above the waterline to be used as evidence for the size of the iceberg.  It is as if they would only accept as evidence for the value of the illegal drug trade that portion of the drugs that law enforcement actually was able to confiscate from the lawbreakers.  The same is true of vote fraud.  The odds are against Trump being able to win in the courts short of the Supreme Court ruling that there was an unconstitutional election resulting in too much uncertainty in several of the states, thereby requiring those state legislatures to make their choice of electors to go to the Electoral College.  The Supreme Court has an obligation under the 14th Amendment to protect the right to vote of individuals from state actions that interfere with their exercise of that right.  Many states have interfered with that right by tolerating vote fraud.

Whatever happens, the effort that will be put into investigating the massive vote fraud that has occurred will be much less than it ought to be.  Too many people, especially those of the Deep State and its many allies, just want to get rid of Trump, as we have seen for the last four or more years.  In addition, too many Americans do not have a sufficiently strong interest in either the Constitution or in letting the many Deplorables have their voices listened to in this or future elections.

The vote count as now reported shows Trump increased the number of votes he received in 2016 by 17.16%, but the total vote count of Trump plus Biden went up by 19.24%.  It sure seems implausible to me that the swampy, corrupt, wrongheaded, evil Biden was capable of getting so many Americans to vote for him that he could overcome a 17.16% Trump vote increase.  I truly do believe this election was stolen.

We must not allow this to ever happen again.  And we must limit the damage by doing all we can to help the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia.  Give them campaign contributions.  Also, support Trump in his efforts to reveal the vote fraud.  Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation have vote integrity programs that should be supported for the longer haul.  Those programs are not nearly large enough or broad enough, however.  It is critical that other liberty-oriented organizations focus on the prevention of vote fraud.  And of course, get after your state legislators to tighten up their election laws to prevent vote fraud.

Evil Biden wants to force Americans to register their guns and pay a high registration fee

Biden has a number of plans to discourage gun ownership.  Among them, he wants to raise the cost of gun ownership by holding gun manufacturer's responsible for any deaths or wounds caused by guns.  He also has a plan to force the registration of guns, which will be accompanied by a large registration fee.

Let us think about this as a matter of principle for a moment.  The right to defend oneself is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.  Freedom of speech is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.

Let us suppose that someone asks you if you think the person they want to marry will be a good lifetime partner for them.  You, as a friend, answer yes.  The marriage ends in divorce.  The divorced partner claims you are partially responsible for the suffering and perhaps financial losses they incurred due to the failure of their marriage.  Should they have the right to sue you for recovery of their losses?  Imagine if they could do this, what this would do to your ability to exercise your right to freedom of speech.  Whatever the actual impact your advice on the proposed marriage might have had, it was the responsibility of the individual receiving that advice to evaluate whether they should marry.  It was the responsibility of the married person to make the marriage work or if they could not do so, to realize that the mistakes or lack of effort were their own.

The gun manufacturer has no significant voice in how the gun they make is used.  It can be used rationally or irrationally.  It can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.  To hold the gun manufacturer responsible for the use of the gun is as nonsensical as holding the marriage advisor responsible for his advice.  Actually, I would be inclined to think that bad advice on marriage would make an easier case for responsibility for harm against the advisor.  At least the marriage advisor presumably has some knowledge of the two people whose marriage is being considered.

Gun registration and fees:  If the government can in principle claim the power to make you register as a gun owner and pay a high fee for doing so, what is to keep the government from next forcing everyone to register for the right to exercise freedom of speech and pay a high registration fee for doing so?  After all, if one right can be controlled, limited, and taxed if it is to be exercised then why would the government defer from doing the same to other rights -- freedom of speech included.  Just as the Democrat Socialist Party thinks guns can be used harmfully by hoodlums, so does that host of parasites believe that Deplorables do great harm with their speech.

Do you think the party of slavery, the early KKK, Jim Crow laws, the Woodrow Wilson second wave of the KKK, segregation, the welfare dependency of many American Blacks, mandatory government school holding pens minus education, that declared Trump voters Deplorables, and the party that has always thought it moral to steal elections, would not desire such control over our freedom to exercise our individual rights that all of them will not disappear unless we throw our minds, hearts, and souls into defending every one of them?

There are myriad reasons why I am voting for Donald Trump

The principal question politically is which candidate is likely to perform better as a protector of my many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, freedom of contract, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to trade, freedom to defend myself from violence, and freedom to my privacy.  I want to be allowed to choose my own values and to be allowed to manage my own life in accordance with my self-chosen values.  I find that present governments are the main threat to my exercise of my rights and the main source of violence and the threat of violence to keep me from rationally managing my own life.  This is not to say that I oppose government in principle.  I do believe that government is necessary to the protection of my individual rights and to a civilized society that will allow me to flourish as the manager of my own life.  However, the federal government and at least almost every state government have taken on many functions that violate my rights and those of others and that do not allow us to rationally manage our own lives.  The governments of the United States of America are badly in need of a massive reduction of their powers.

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden (Kamala Harris) will provide a legitimate and proper government.  Given the preferences of most Americans, that would be impossible even if one of them were so inclined.  However, there are leagues and leagues of distance between these candidates respecting the exercise of governmental power and the resulting range over which its threats of violence will roam in the lives of the American people.  

The President will bring with him a party, from which he will draw advisors and managers for the exceedingly powerful Executive Branch of the government.  The Democratic Party is the party of greater racism, corruption, demagoguery, contempt for the American citizen, pessimism and fear, anti-business hatred, distrust in freedom of speech and conscience, and lust for power.  It was the party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK, of opposition to ending school segregation, the greater number who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, highly inadequate public schools in the inner cities, inadequate police protection in the inner cities, claims that Black Americans can neither achieve educational success nor financial success in the free market, advocates group identity politics with all of its divisiveness, and has over and over implied that any Black American who is independent minded is not Black and is a sell-out.  The Democrats have long been the kings of voter fraud, violators of the rule of law, more inclined to govern for the sake of special interests, the associates of union thugs who are usually either Mafia or Communists, and the most willing to seek further powers to shake down the American people.  The Democrats think most so-called Blacks and Latinos are incompetent to manage their own lives and that all so-called whites but the college educated are rednecks, or even that every white person is a racist.  The Democrat Party is the party that does not admit that the best way to raise everyone's standard of living is to allow the free market to function and raise our productivity so that the economy grows with a compounded higher growth rate.  It is the party that has the greater fear of every chemical, disease, or human act that has any effect upon the environment, to the point that it has become anti-human in its suppression of our efforts to be productive.  It is the party that has the broader and more intense distrust of businesses and the freedom of association of the free market.  It has become the party most inclined to suppress freedom of speech, as witness its control of college campuses, the elderly media, the Silicon Valley Internet businesses, and the regulations it has imposed on businesses.  It has systematically interfered with individual's freedom of religion by shutting down church operations during the pandemic and with requirements that people support abortions and contraceptives against their will and religious beliefs.

Biden was never very smart to begin with.  He is clearly losing mental capability.  He does not know whether is he is running for the President or the Senate.  He does not know what state he is in.  He is campaigning against someone named George, we do not know whether that George is HW or W.  He cannot remember that thing, you know, who gave us our individual rights according to the Declaration of Independence.  When he retained some cogency years ago, he claimed the Declaration of Independence was not a part of our laws.  This is expected from Democrats, who do not want our Constitution to have a philosophical basis in political governance.  Without that, the Constitution is more malleable.  Biden stops work in the morning, not having the energy to go on.  Some Democrats will not mind replacing him with Kamala Harris, a decidedly socialist Senators.  However, Sen. Harris could not get very far in her own presidential campaign and dropped out early since she could not perform well in even her home state of California.  President Trump was smarter to begin with and has retained his intelligence and energy.

Biden is an inveterate liar.  Yes, Trump exaggerates.  But Trump has never told a whopper of the size that Biden did when Biden claims over and over that all of the people who died because of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus were killed by Trump.  They were actually killed by the virus with help from the Chinese Communist Party and some Democratic governors who put sick people in elderly care facilities.  Biden plagiarized a paper in law school.  He claimed he was the best political science student, when he was far from it.  He claimed he was first in his law class when he was not even average.  He claimed that his life was that of Neil Kinnoch, the British Labor Leader in a heavily plagiarized speech Biden gave in his first presidential campaign.

Biden is not a nice man.  He likes to tell his audiences that he is brighter than any of them, though that is often unlikely.  When challenged on an issue, he is inclined to invite a man to meet him behind the gym for a fight.  Or he may just call you a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."  Biden claims he is the Democratic Party.  Apparently all other Democrats do not count.  He has claimed that his mentor in the Senate was Robert Byrd, the segregationist.  Indeed, Delaware was one of the segregationist states sued in Brown v. Board of Education, that ended public school segregation under the Eisenhower administration.  By the way, Gen. Eisenhower pushed hard for the desegregation of the Army during WWII and continued to push it when he was President.  Senator Biden came along too late to play a role in the segregationist policies of Delaware, but he was opposed to busing and was clearly sympathetic with the old segregationist members of the Democratic Party.  Opposition to busing was often justified, but there is today no tolerance for that opposition in the socialist Democratic Party.

Biden runs a family based crime syndicate, which is a bit less sophisticated than that run by the Clintons.  He and his family are paid huge sums of money by evil foreigners, especially oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Chinese Communist Party.  It is wrong to do business with such people and I am quite sure that they have their hooks deep into his depraved soul.  With Russia and China very much opposed to the well-being of the USA, he would be a seriously compromised President.  His past policies with respect to both Russia and China were much too accommodating to them.

The Democratic Party has its power base in the education establishment, the media, the labor unions, and in some ethnic groups that have tended to vote heavily for the Democrats very contrary to their actual rational interest.  Perhaps the most broadly important of these power bases is the control of the education system as a result of a largely government run school and university education system.  Even private schools are heavily controlled by government in their curricula, financing of students, operational requirements beyond teaching, and as a source for grant money.  In at least most government-run schools, the teachers are not professional managers of 20 to 30 students at a time, but merely blue collar workers incapable of management functions and of negotiating their own salaries and working conditions by their choice of socialist labor union representation.  The schools are operated primarily for the purpose of indoctrinating youth to want expanded government as the solution to every problem and for the benefit of the socialist labor union.  Such an education system does not equip students with the knowledge and independent thinking skills they need to become the watchdogs of their individual rights and the opponents of excessive, illegitimate government.  In most cases these students do not receive an adequate education in writing, reading, math, science, history, economics, civics, and philosophy.  Joe Biden strongly supports the limited and twisted education that government and socialist labor unions are willing to provide.  President Trump recognizes such a education as a terrible problem and wants to provide everyone with school choice.

Biden and the Democrats want to kill the Right to Work Laws throughout the nation by federal law.  The very idea that anyone has to allow someone else to represent him in his negotiations with management for the sale of his labor is an abomination.  That he then has to pay union dues to the agent that usurped his right to sell his own labor makes this still worse.  Most Americans, even most in the states without Right to Work, favor Right to Work legislation.  The Democrats favor rules that do not even allow most workers at a business to vote on whether they will be represented by a union or not.  They favor rapid elections that do not allow workers or management in opposition to effectively make their argument.  They support union votes that are not based on secret ballots.  They support union exceptions that allow union thugs to intimate and even beat up workers who do not want to join a union or who oppose union aims.  Trump has no such desire to give labor unions this kind of control over our lives.

Biden wants to have the USA rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which will have a devastating effect on a booming energy export business for Americans based on the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  They claim that doing so is based on science, which is a blatant lie.  The global computer models are now in the 6th generation and they have always made wrong predictions and they have not even shown signs of improvement.  The reason is because the physics input into the models is wrong, as I have shown on this blog repeatedly.  But you do not even have to know enough physics to understand my arguments.  All you have to know is that any theory that makes wrong predictions is wrong.  This is a basic principle of the scientific method.  One cannot claim that catastrophic man-made global warming is consensus science when it is not science at all.  In addition, carbon dioxide is a very beneficial plant fertilizer and a 1.5K increase in temperature would cause more good than harm, contrary to the heated claims of the U.N. and others.  Trump has enough sense not to believe in the claims and to see that the Paris Climate Accord will do more harm than good to Americans.

Biden wants to transition the energy sector away from coal, oil, and gas, claiming they are polluting and destructive because they result in carbon dioxide emissions.  He says he will make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide in four years, by 2025.  To do that, he has to make their operations vastly more expensive.  In doing so, he is willing to put millions of Americans out of work, cause the cost of energy to skyrocket for both residential and commercial use, cause our transportation costs to go up greatly, force the use of expensive, light frame, short-range vehicles loaded with heavy batteries with short life-times and inconvenient recharging schedules, and force a crash program to build massive farms of wind generators and solar panels which produce unreliable and expensive energy.  The alternative energy developments will rely on government using force to make the costs of coal, oil, and gas become much greater by making them pay to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The wind generators will kill ever greater numbers of birds and bats, require incredible amounts of concrete to anchor them whose production emits massive loads carbon dioxide, and require massive mining projects to obtain the required rare earth elements, copper, iron for steel production, plastic resin for the carbon fiber blades, and lithium for backup storage batteries.  The solar panels will require massive plants to make the photovoltaic materials, many of which are highly toxic, and the mining of much silver and copper.  Oh, and by the way, the Democrats really hate mining and toxic chemicals, so as the required massive production gets underway, they will put on the brakes, leaving us with much less power from coal, oil, and gas and not nearly enough energy to replace their lost production with.

Biden wants to increase our taxes and the burden of taxes on everyone.  Yes, he says he will only increase taxes on those making over $400,000 per year and on businesses.  I suspect that his rationale for saying this is that the Trump tax cut for individuals is going to expire and he is going to see to it that it is not extended.  So, he will not raise your taxes, because the the Democrats already insured that the Trump tax cut for individuals had an expiration date.  So, everyone who paid more taxes prior to the Trump tax cut, will pay more soon again.  Then additional taxes will be piled on people making over $400,000 a year and on corporations.  Many people who pay over $400,000 in taxes do so because their business income is taxed on their personal income tax.  The more money taken by government from businesses, the less money businesses have to expand, improve their productivity, train their employees, hire new employees, pay state and local taxes, pay their employees better, and work to raise our standard of living.  Meanwhile, government will take this money and pay its expanded well-paid bureaucracy, hire contractors with good government connections, force the contractors to use union labor, apply the money to political advantage, and deliver a product of low quality.  Basically, a tax on any of us, is a tax on all of us, except for a favored few who will make out like bandits.  The cost of living will rise with far too little to show for it.  Trump would like to lower our taxes and most definitely to extend the individual tax rate cut.

Consistent with the fearful and the anti-business mentalities that dominate the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and the Democrats want to keep business, the schools, and other functions in which people congregate such as churches shut down until the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus somehow disappears.  They have little regard for how many businesses are destroyed, how many workers become unemployed, how many children and young people fall behind in their education, how religious freedom is curtailed, how many people do not go to doctors when they need to do so, how many people become severely depressed, how many people commit suicide, become alcoholics, or use other harmful drugs.  Their fear, fed by the media and the socialist education system, dominates all.  President Trump understands that most people, excepting some elderly and some people with other medical problems, generally need to return to normal productive activities.

In the name of group identity politics and the designation of some groups as inherently racist, as the Democrats now often claim all white people are, the Democratic Party has readily welcomed demonstrations in the streets, even as they have shut down or tried to shut down almost all other gatherings of Americans.  Going beyond this, they generally tolerated actual violence for a long while, until it became clear that most Americans were repulsed by the violence and the Democrats began to fear the effects of this on their fate in the upcoming 2020 elections.  It has been Trump who has been far more concerned with the effects of the violence on personal security and property destruction, much of which was especially hurting many small business owners, many of whom were in poorer areas of cities.  In every case, such violence and property destruction drive up the costs of business operation, increase prices, and result in less employment in cities where this is very harmful to many inhabitants.

The Democrats and Biden effectively want to cripple the people's ability to defend themselves from the violence that Democrat controlled government does not want to protect them from.  They are strongly determined to constrict or even to squash our 2nd Amendment rights.  Trump stands firm on this constitutional right to have the means to defend oneself and one's family.

Biden is advocating a massive infrastructure expenditure geared to create union jobs.  He wants to pay for more zero-emission mass transit in every American city with 100,000 or more inhabitants.  Even traditional mass transit has always lost money in astounding amounts in American cities.  He wants to build more bicycle paths.  He will have the government build a network of electric vehicle recharging stations, apparently so you can get halfway there and spend a few hours recharging and then get back on the road again.  Somehow or other, he will have us building electric vehicles in this program too.  He is going to spend money on the energy infrastructure itself, which apparently means the government will own the energy infrastructure.  What could go wrong with that?  He is somehow going to upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes.  He will install more energy efficient windows and appliances.  He is going to build 1.5 million sustainable homes.  He will have a program for environmental justice, whatever that is.  Except, the money to do these things will really come out of your pocket, some way or the other, and mean that you cannot use that money to do what you wanted to do with it.

Biden shows his economic ignorance, or is it willingness to do great harm to many in his pursuit of demagogic influence upon the economically ignorant, in advocating a $15/hour national minimum wage.  There should not be a minimum wage established by any level of government.  That is an interference with everyone's freedom of association and freedom to earn a living.  The fact that one would have difficulty having one job and being the soul worker in a family of four and living on a wage of less than $15/hour is irrelevant.  It is especially young people who are under-educated who need a chance to prove they can be a reliable worker and are willing to learn on the job who need jobs that pay less than what a worker who has a family to support would need to earn.  Minimum wages hurt those who most need to work, but have the lowest skills to offer.  Minimum wage laws are especially loved by labor unions who want to exclude competing workers from the market by using the force of government.  After all, those union workers have to earn more so they can pay a large sum to the labor union bosses, who in turn need to use much of it to buy off the Democrat politicians who give great power to the union bosses.  Yet while minimum wage laws are always harmful, they are especially harmful at the national level.  A minimum wage of $15/hour is less harmful in New York City or San Francisco than it is in Muddy Gap, Wyoming, Magnolia, Mississippi, or Loco Hills, New Mexico.  Of course, Democrats are very happy to destroy these low cost of living small towns.  Trump cares about the rural areas, the small towns, and the low cost of living areas much more than does Biden.

Biden does not believe our legislators need to read a bill before they vote on it.  He was happy to go along with the ObamaCare atrocity that made us buy insurance we did not want or need.  He was went along with the lie that ObamaCare did not have a tax in it, but then it did when the Supreme Court torturously ruled it constitutional because it had a tax in it.  He went along with the lie that you could keep your insurance if you wanted and keep your doctor if you wanted.  Then there was the lie that ObamaCare would save a family of four $2500 a year.  Under ObamaCare health care cost have doubled.  In many areas of the country, there is one and only one plan available, but that is of no concern to the Democrats who rule the cities where that is not true.  It is only Republican rural areas with totally monopoly ObamaCare.

Biden intends to set up a Blue Panel Committee to provide him with cover to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.  Biden and the Democrats believe the courts should be free to set policy, abrogating the constitutional responsibility of the Congress to do that.  Trump, on the other hand has appointed three Supreme Court Justices who recognize the division of powers in the Constitution and know that the function of the federal courts is to see that the rule of the laws of Congress duly instituted is to be enforced in the justice system.  Amy Coney Barrett may be his crowning appointment.

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  It had the largest government apparatus to corrupt.  It had a bureaucracy that was composed of well over 90% Democrats operating in Washington, DC where any government employee crime had to be tried before a court whose jury was sure to be 95% composed of Democrats, who would never find any Democrat guilty of any crime that was aiding the Democratic Party.  But, Republicans beware the DC justice system.

The Obama/Biden administration supplied drug lords with weapons.  They rewarded Senator John Kerry with the State Department after he used his Senate seat power to threaten drug companies and other companies with harmful legislation if they did not pay him off.  He used insider information to make investments that paid him very well.  Following his time in the State Department, they gave the position to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who used her position to fill the Clinton Foundation with money, much of which was used for family expenses.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to heavily discriminate against Tea Party and limited government organizations that applied for tax exempt status, greatly suppressing their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  No one was ever prosecuted for this, despite one official responsible having had many meetings with Obama, which were surely due to his coordinating the effort.

Under the Obama/Biden administration the NSA very widely spied on Americans, contrary to the law.  The head of the NSA lied to Congress about this.  The administration promulgated the lie that the riot and attack against the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya was because some guy in America had shown a video on the Internet.  They claimed they could not rescue the Ambassador and the CIA and State Dept. men protecting him, when they really acted with such negligence and indecision that they could not then provide a rescue.  This was a dark moment in U.S. history.

The Obama/Biden administration pursued the most dastardly agendas in U.S. history in trying to prevent the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  They used the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and numerous Democrats in the Department of Justice to frame people in the Trump campaign as collaborators with the Russians.  They lied to the FISA courts in order to spy on the Trump campaign and then on his transition team.  This was far worse than Watergate.  For three years they used Russian collaboration claims to distract the Trump administration and to discredit it in the eyes of many Americans who could not see through the lies of the Democrats and the elderly, obsolete media, academia, and their fellow travelers.  Yet, it was long ago clear that it was Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Obama/Biden administration that were in league with the Russian disinformation apparatus.  It was the Democrats who undermined the federal government in the interest of Russia and very much to the harm of the American people.  When the Russia hoax fell apart, they then created the Ukraine hoax for the impeachment of Trump.  This also fell apart, but served as a huge distraction and to create much disharmony among Americans.

Many libertarians fault Donald Trump for not entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though he has since entered into a number of bilateral trade deals with other nations who were in that proposed trade deal.  Not every trade deal is advantageous.  Others criticize him for ending NAFTA and negotiating a new deal with Mexico and Canada.  The new deal has some advantages for Americans, having fixed some problems with NAFTA.  But there is also some protectionism in the new deal also.  All of this is a mixed bag.  However, the alterations in the China trade agreements really did need to be done.  We were doing too much trade with China and there were many ways in which they were taking advantage of their Most Favored Nation and WTO status, given to them by Obama/Biden.  China is out to control the world and it is using the investments of Capitalists to get in position to hang Capitalists.  It has been stealing our intellectual property and our capital investments in China left and right.  This is a nation that uses slave labor, harvests organs, violates religious freedom, violated the treaty over its governance of Hong Kong, and is expansionist in the South China Sea and in the Himalayan Mountains, having previously invaded Tibet.  China is ruled by very evil people who appear to have Biden in their pocket.  We need to trade much less with this rogue nation.

Biden and Obama were convinced that manufacturing in the U.S. was essentially a matter of business raping Gaia.  They viewed it as environmentally bad.  They were happy to export our manufacturing capability to China.  This was very much to China's advantage militarily and in terms of world economic influence and power.  The pandemic helped to show how absurdly dependent we have become on China's manufacturing and how they are happy to use that to their advantage.

The Democrats like to claim that Trump has hurt us with our allies.  Yet, our ally Germany was pledged to spend 2% of its GDP on defense as a NATO ally.  Instead, Germany had long taken advantage of us by spending only 1.2% of its GDP, giving it an economic advantage.  By November 2019, Germany had increased its defense spending to 1.38% of GDP, after much complaining about pressure from Trump.  By October 2020, German spending was up to 1.57%.  Back in 2014, only three countries in NATO spent as much as 2% of GDP.  By October 2020, ten NATO nations spent at least 2%.  Of course, some of these nations did not like being pressured to meet their pledges.  Trump was quite right in pressuring them to do so.  Obama/Biden had not applied much pressure on this, so the nations of NATO were very accustomed to allowing the U.S. to protect them with little of their help.

One of the most important things Trump has done is to cut back on the excesses of the regulatory bureaucracy, as well as putting pressure on Congress not to give the regulatory agencies more power.  Regulatory compliance is estimated to cost $1.9 trillion a year.  Regulations are primarily directed at businesses and they are especially costly for small businesses.  Big business often supports more regulation to reduce the ability of smaller businesses to challenge them in the marketplace.  Big business can more readily hire experts to put them in compliance and they can often control the agencies that regulate them.  By law, any new regulation costing over $100 million in compliance costs, must have a cost-benefit analysis performed.  The Obama/Biden administration very commonly ignored this law.  When they did do a cost-benefit analysis, they commonly greatly underestimated the cost and over-stated the benefits.  They used regulations and changes in the interpretation of regulations to damage or destroy whole industries.  The coal industry was very much one such example.  Out of work coal miners, railroad and barge workers, and coal-fired power plant workers can thank these heartless souls, Obama and Biden, for the loss of many such jobs.  Yes, natural gas from fracking was going to cause some significant switching from coal to natural gas, but the government had no business putting its heavy foot on the scale on the side of natural gas.

After the election of 2016, manufacturing began to recover in the U.S.  Manufacturers are my laboratory's primary customers and my business increased steadily and strongly after the election until the CCP coronavirus caught up with us.  When manufacturers could not see regulatory and legal stability and faced the world's highest tax rates, as was the case under Obama/Biden, there were many reasons to manufacture in other countries and that is where their efforts went.  Not only did we lose the manufacturing capability, but we began losing the design, technology, and general engineering capability that were tied to the nations where the manufacturing was performed.  As a result, my laboratory was in a depression that lasted from 2009 through 2016. Fortunately, under the Trump presidency, huge increases in work and income followed in 2017 and then in 2018 and 2019.

Frankly, I have run out of time to write about the many reasons why President Trump is vastly superior to Joe Biden as our President.  There is absolutely no contest here in terms of a rational assessment of who will do the better job of protecting the rights of the individual, allowing the market to recover from the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus, and allowing productive people to raise our future standard of living.  The socialist Biden would be a disaster, as is his entire party.

Residents of Butler County, PA requested nearly 40,000 mail-in ballots - Few have arrived

Butler County, PA in western Pennsylvania voted 66% for Trump and 29% for Clinton in the 2016 election.  In this 2020 election, nearly 40,000 residents of Butler County requested mail-in ballots.  Only 24% of those ballots have been received.  A U.S. Postal System spokesman says that they do not have any record of having the undelivered ballots.  The U.S. Postal System is primarily run by the American Postal Workers Union, which has endorsed Joe Biden.  So the USPS has a strong political bias.  The governor of Pennsylvania has also shown that he has a very strong political bias and the willingness to engage in dirty tricks to swing this critical election toward the inert Joe Biden.  So, is this a massive case of voter suppression?

Of the seven justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, five were appointed by Democrats.  Pennsylvania Democrats have had their Supreme Court rule that contrary to Pennsylvania law, mail-in ballots can be received well after election day, which begs for voter fraud.  The PA Supreme Court has also ruled that ballots cannot be disqualified because ballot signatures do not match registration signatures.  Philadelphia is well-known for its ability to deliver 150,000 fraudulent votes that get counted in every presidential election.  All of those fraudulent votes are votes for the Democrats.  The Democrats have long shown that they are completely untrustworthy in elections in Pennsylvania.  With so many tools to corrupt the Pennsylvania 2020 election, massive vote fraud is to be expected.  The nation should insist on a thorough investigation into voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is our most stalwart defender of the Constitution

Today is the 29th anniversary of the day our greatest Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, took his seat on the highest judicial court in the great United States of America.  For all his faults, President George H. W. Bush did do one very great service to our country -- he nominated and strongly supported Clarence Thomas to be a Justice on the Supreme Court despite the vicious attacks upon him during his confirmation hearings.

Justice Clarence Thomas has been a tireless and ruthlessly criticized originalist interpreter of the Constitution and of our laws.  He has written 190 opinions, which is far more than any of the other justices have written.  His opinions have had a strong influence on the conservative side of the Supreme Court.  Justice Thomas has been more ready than any other Justice to review prior opinions he believes were wrongly decided.  He is a man with a dedication to independent thinking, which makes him a spear in the side of those Democrats who insist a man is not Black unless he agrees with them.  Personally, I view Justice Clarence Thomas as an unusually rational man who has earned my highest respect and gratitude for his profound service to the rights of the individual, to the rule of law, and to justice, all of which are well served by our Constitution, of which he is the foremost defender.  Justice Clarence Thomas is a genuine hero.

If you want to learn more, read this article:

For 29 Years, Justice Clarence Thomas Has Been the North Star for Originalism on the Supreme Court by Mark Paoletta

My Facebook Page Has Been Unavailable Much of This Weekend

 Much of this weekend, I have been getting this response to trying to see my Facebook page:

Of course this might really be a technical error, though that is just identified in the notice as a possibility.  Given the fact that I oppose a Joe Biden presidency and Facebook has been making pages unavailable when they refer to issues not favorable to Joe Biden, the reference to a possible technical error may well be a cover for Facebook censoring my Facebook page.  When trust is lost, as it is when one party censors another, it is hard to believe the suggestion that the failure of my page to load is a technical error.

My own writings appear on my blog and are then transported to Facebook, often a day or two later, because I have always wanted to discourage the use of Facebook. 

Biden Promises to Destroy Fossil Fuels Industries in 4-year Transition Period Ending in 2025

Many people will say that he said no such thing. Literally, he did not say this. However, rational individuals will see that this four-year transition period is the implication of the things he said, but would never have the courage to say explicitly. 

What did he explicitly say? Let us list his key statements:

"I would transition away from the oil industry, yes."

"It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time."

"I'd stop giving to the oil industry, I'd stop giving them federal subsidies."

"We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025."

"The point is, look, we have to move toward a net-zero emissions.  The first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production, by 2050 totally."

Biden's energy plan does not literally call for shutting down the entire oil and gas and coal industries by 2025.  It calls for zero-emissions with a fantasy that one will develop a huge industry that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The cost of actually sucking carbon dioxide, plant food, from the atmosphere will be gigantic.  It will have a huge negative impact on farming as well.  The materials that will hold the carbon dioxide will have to be mined at great cost, or great caverns will have to be created to hold the removed carbon dioxide.  The sequestration of carbon dioxide will have major environmental costs itself.

How will the otherworldly costs of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere be borne?  If it is to be borne by the American taxpayer, that would be a subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industries, in the left's viewpoint.  Since Biden pledges no subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries, they will have to pay the incredible costs for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  This will cause the costs of oil, gas, and coal to skyrocket.  Skyrocketing costs means much lower usage of oil, gas, and coal.  This means many, many oil, gas, and coal workers will become unemployed.  It means that many people who transport oil, gas, coal, and products made from them will become unemployed.  Those towns and cities which presently support these industries will have massive unemployment.  As West Virginia has suffered greatly from the travails of coal under prohibitive governmental mandated expenses, so will many other areas be devastated.  Western Pennsylvania, eastern and southern Ohio, North Dakota, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana will be very hard hit.

All of this is to happen in a crash manner by 2025, according to what Biden said in the debate.  Some say he was confused and meant to say by 2035, the date he gave for zero-emissions in energy production.  Maybe he was confused and careless.  Maybe the differing dates are because the huge changes in energy production to create tens of thousands of wind generators, huge photovoltaic farms, bank after bank of batteries, and the means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in massive quantities will cause the generation of a huge load of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Making cement blocks huge enough to anchor those wind generators releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for instance.  Mining the materials for huge, sweeping banks of batteries, for the materials to make wind generators, and to make photovoltaic farms requires an incredible amount of energy use.  So, maybe Biden is saying the oil, gas, and coal industries must be zero-emissions by 2025, but the totally changed energy industry as a whole will not have to be zero-emissions until 2035.  That would make sense, if the U.S. economy could survive such wrenching changes in a 14 year period.  But it cannot do so.  Trump is right that this would cause our economy to falter badly.  We would be in for a never-ending depression.

Stop and think about the consequences of skyrocketing energy costs.  All of our transportation costs will go up greatly.  Manufacturing operations require considerable energy and they require that it be dependable.  A power outage can destroy all of the materials or products in a production process at the time of power failure.  A laboratory, such as mine, can lose many hours of time when an analysis process is stopped in mid-stream and a unique sample is destroyed.  The cost of virtually every product must go up as its production cost goes up and the transportation cost to get it to the customer goes up.  One of the reasons Americans have higher incomes than the vast majority of people around the world is because we have a lower cost of energy and a more dependable supply of energy than almost any other country.  Under Biden's energy plan, manufacturers will have no choice but to move many manufacturing and support jobs out of the U.S.  That situation will be even worse than it was under the Obama/Biden administration.  When manufacturing goes overseas, the support technology also goes overseas.  Engineering and science jobs in support of manufacturing disappear, along with the knowledge to make things.  The U.S. will lose the knowledge that has given us the very superior standard of living we have.

As I have shown in many posts on this blog, the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis has been proven to be wrong.  The Earth energy budgets that summarize the understanding of the so-called consensus violate physics.  The climate models based on their wrong ideas of physics, keep making wrong predictions about the temperatures in the atmosphere and about future temperatures.  Of course they do, because they do not understand the physics of thermal radiation, convection in air, and they even violate energy conservation.  Even if one does not understand the physics, as very few people do, the scientific method says the hypothesis is wrong because the model predictions have been wrong.

Of course the insanity of the Biden energy plan does not stand alone among his insane policy ideas.  Biden will hit the American economy with a slew of new regulations with a massive expansion of the Swamp Creature regulatory state.  Regulations are a huge expense burden on business already.  Small businesses cannot even know what the regulations are because they do not have the means to monitor the avalanche of new regulations and interpretations of regulations that occur each year.  Businesses that want to make large investments are afraid to do so, because the new operations they want to create may take years to be in place (in large part due to regulations) and then take years to make back their initial investment.  What arbitrary, irrationally expensive regulations relative to any benefits will come down the pike and wipe out their investment?  Politicians rarely think about the consequences of their actions, except as far as the next election at most.  A lifetime politician like Biden is not even capable of thinking about the destructive nature of his ideas.  The actions President Trump has taken to moderate the burdens of federal regulations are a much under-esteemed effect of his administration.

Another idiot's delight is a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, which was backed by Biden in the debate and has widespread support in the Democratic Party.  As I have previously written on this blog, the cost of living in the U.S. varies hugely across the country.  A business in NYC or one in San Francisco is much more likely to be able to justify paying an employee $15 an hour than is a small business in Okmulgee, Oklahoma or Arco, Idaho or Rising Sun, Mississippi.  The $15/hour Biden plan is a way to depopulate rural America and to force everyone into huge metropolitan areas where the cost of living is much higher, but one can also often earn more money.  Unfortunately, this actually tends to result in a real lowering of the standard of living of many people, especially the very poorer people that the $15/hour proposal pretends to help.  The resident of NYC with a mean income earns less real income than does the mean income earning American when you correct for the higher cost of living!  For a person of mean income, moving from Oklahoma to NYC actually lowers your standard of living, despite the fact you will likely be paid more.

President Trump understands the basic principles that allow our economy to flourish and that allow Americans to enjoy an increasing standard of living.  Joe Biden does not.

Voter Registration in 353 Counties in 29 States Exceeds 100% of Eligible Voters -- Says Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch has long been working to force reluctant local and state governments to comply with the federal law that requires them to keep accurate voter registration rolls.  This is a critical task if we are to have legitimate elections and it is one of several reasons why I am a Judicial Watch contributor.

Judicial Watch has released an updated study of the problem.  This problem is especially acute when the states are sending out mass mailings of ballots to everyone on the absurdly inflated voter registration rolls.  The highlights of the results follow from an email I just received from Judicial Watch:

Voter Registration in 353 Counties in 29 States Exceeds 100%

In 2018 the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from our settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio. California settled a NVRA lawsuit with us and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit. In September 2020, we sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter roll data in violation of Federal law.

So we’ve been busy and effective. Unfortunately, the problem persists.

Our newly released study reveals that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters. The study finds eight states showing statewide registration rates exceeding 100%: Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The September 2020 study collected the most recent registration data posted online by the states themselves. This data was then compared to the Census Bureau’s most recent five-year population estimates, gathered by the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2014 through 2018. ACS surveys are sent to 3.5 million addresses each month, and its five-year estimates are considered to be the most reliable estimates outside of the decennial census.

Our latest study is necessarily limited to 37 states that post regular updates to their registration data. Certain state voter registration lists may also be even larger than reported, because they may have excluded “inactive voters” from their data. Inactive voters, who may have moved elsewhere, are still registered voters and may show up and vote on election day and/or request mail-in ballots.

We rely on our voter registration studies to warn states that they are failing to comply with the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires states to make reasonable efforts to clean their voter rolls. We can and have sued to enforce compliance with federal law.

Earlier this month, we sued Colorado over its failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act. In our new study, 42 Colorado counties—or two thirds of the state’s counties—had registration rates exceeding 100%. Particular data from the state confirms this general picture. As the complaint explains, a month-by-month comparison of the ACS’s five-year survey period with Colorado’s own registration numbers for the exact same months shows that large proportions of Colorado’s counties have registration rates exceeding 100%. Earlier this year, we sued Pennsylvania and North Carolina for failing to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls as required by federal law. The lawsuits allege that the two states have nearly 2 million inactive names on their voter registration rolls. We also sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter roll data in violation of Federal law.

Our study updates the results of a similar study from last year. In August 2019 we analyzed registration data that states reported to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in response to a survey conducted every two years on how states maintain their voter rolls. That registration data was compared to the then-most-recent ACS five-year survey from 2013 through 2017. The study showed that 378 U.S. counties had registration rates exceeding 100%.
The new study shows 1.8 million excess, or ‘ghost’ voters in 353 counties across 29 states. The data highlights the recklessness of mailing blindly ballots and ballot applications to voter registration lists. Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections.

STATES AND COUNTIES WITH REGISTRATION RATES EXCEEDING 100%

(* means no separate reporting of inactive registrations)
 

Alabama: Lowndes County (130%); Macon County (114%); Wilcox (113%); Perry County (111%); Madison County (109%); Hale County (108%); Marengo County (108%); Baldwin (108%); Greene County (107%); Washington County (106%); Dallas County (106%); Choctaw County (105%); Conecuh County (105%); Randolph County (104%); Shelby County (104%); Lamar County (103%); Autauga County (103%); Clarke County (103%); Henry County (103%); Monroe County (102%); Colbert County (101%); Jefferson County (101%); Lee County (100%); Houston County (100%); Crenshaw County (100%)

*Alaska: Statewide (111%)

Arizona: Santa Cruz County (107%); Apache County (106%)

*Arkansas: Newton County (103%)

Colorado: Statewide (102%); San Juan County (158%); Dolores County (127%); Jackson County (125%); Mineral County (119%); Ouray County (119%); Phillips County (116%); Douglas County (116%); Broomfield County (115%); Elbert County (113%); Custer County (112%); Gilpin County (111%); Park County (111%); Archuleta County (111%); Cheyenne County (111%); Clear Creek County (110%); Teller County (108%); Grand County (107%); La Plata County (106%); Summit County (106%); Baca County (106%); Pitkin County (106%); San Miguel County (106%); Routt County (106%); Hinsdale County (105%); Garfield County (105%); Gunnison County (105%); Sedgwick County (104%); Eagle County (104%); Larimer County (104%); Weld County (104%); Boulder County (103%); Costilla County (103%); Chaffee County (103%); Kiowa County (103%); Denver County (103%); Huerfano County (102%); Montezuma County (102%); Moffat County (102%); Arapahoe County (102%); Jefferson County (101%); Las Animas County (101%); Mesa County (100%.

*Florida: St. Johns County (112%); Nassau County (109%); Walton County (108%); Santa Rosa County (108%); Flagler County (104%); Clay County (103%); Indian River County (101%); Osceola County (100%)

*Georgia: Bryan County (118%); Forsyth County (114%); Dawson County (113%); Oconee County (111%); Fayette County (111%); Fulton County (109%); Cherokee County (109%); Jackson County (107%); Henry County (106%); Lee County (106%); Morgan County (105%); Clayton County (105%); DeKalb County (105%); Gwinnett County (104%); Greene County (104%); Cobb County (104%); Effingham County (103%); Walton County (102%); Rockdale County (102%); Barrow County (101%); Douglas County (101%); Newton County (100%); Hall County (100%)

*Indiana: Hamilton County (113%); Boone County (112%); Clark County (105%); Floyd County (103%); Hancock County (103%); Ohio County (102%); Hendricks County (102%); Lake County (101%); Warrick County (100%); Dearborn County (100%)
Iowa: Dallas County (115%); Johnson County (104%); Lyon County (103%); Dickinson County (103%); Scott County (102%); Madison County (101%); Warren County (100%)

*Kansas: Johnson County (105%)
Maine: Statewide (101%); Cumberland County (110%); Sagadahoc County (107%); Hancock County (105%); Lincoln County (104%); Waldo County (102%); York County (100%)

Maryland: Statewide (102%); Montgomery County (113%); Howard County (111%); Frederick County (110%); Charles County (108%); Prince George’s County (106%); Queen Anne’s County (104%); Calvert County (104%); Harford County (104%); Worcester County (103%); Carroll County (103%); Anne Arundel County (102%); Talbot County (100%)

*Massachusetts: Dukes County (120%); Nantucket County (115%); Barnstable County (103%)

*Michigan: Statewide (105%); Leelanau County (119%); Otsego County (118%); Antrim County (116%); Kalkaska County (115%); Emmet County (114%); Berrien County (114%); Keweenaw County (114%); Benzie County (113%); Washtenaw County (113%); Mackinac County (112%); Dickinson County (112%); Roscommon County (112%); Charlevoix County (112%); Grand Traverse County (111%); Oakland County (110%); Iron County (110%); Monroe County (109%); Genesee County (109%); Ontonagon County (109%); Gogebic County (109%); Livingston County (109%); Alcona County (108%); Cass County (108%); Allegan County (108%); Oceana County (107%); Midland County (107%); Kent County (107%); Montmorency County (107%); Van Buren County (107%); Wayne County (107%); Schoolcraft County (107%); Mason County (107%); Oscoda County (107%); Iosco County (107%); Wexford County (106%); Presque Isle County (106%); Delta County (106%); Alpena County (106%); St Clair County (106%); Cheboygan County (105%); Newaygo County (105%); Barry County (105%); Gladwin County (105%); Menominee County (105%); Crawford County (105%); Muskegon County (105%); Kalamazoo County (104%); St. Joseph County (104%); Ottawa County (103%); Clinton County (103%); Saginaw County (103%); Manistee County (103%); Lapeer County (103%); Calhoun County (103%); Ogemaw County (103%); Macomb County (103%); Missaukee County (102%); Eaton County (102%); Shiawassee County (102%); Huron County (102%); Lenawee County (101%); Branch County (101%); Osceola County (101%); Clare County (100%); Arenac County (100%); Bay County (100%); Lake County (100%)

*Missouri: St. Louis County (102%)

*Montana: Petroleum County (113%); Gallatin County (103%); Park County (103%); Madison County (102%); Broadwater County (102%)

*Nebraska: Arthur County (108%); Loup County (103%); Keya Paha County (102%); Banner County (100%); McPherson County (100%)

Nevada: Storey County (108%); Douglas County (105%); Nye County (101%)
*New Jersey: Statewide (102%); Somerset County (110%); Hunterdon County (108%); Morris County (107%); Essex County (106%); Monmouth County (104%); Bergen County (103%); Middlesex County (103%); Union County (103%); Camden County (102%); Warren County (102%); Atlantic County (102%); Sussex County (101%); Salem County (101%); Hudson County (100%); Gloucester County (100%)

*New Mexico: Harding County (177%); Los Alamos County (110%)

New York: Hamilton County (118%); Nassau County (109%); New York (103%); Rockland County (101%); Suffolk County (100%)

*Oregon: Sherman County (107%); Crook County (107%); Deschutes County (105%); Wallowa County (103%); Hood River County (103%); Columbia County (102%); Linn County (101%); Polk County (100%); Tillamook County (100%)

Rhode Island: Statewide (101%); Bristol County (104%); Washington County (103%); Providence County (101%)

*South Carolina: Jasper County (103%)

South Dakota: Hanson County (171%); Union County (120%); Jones County (116%); Sully County (115%); Lincoln County (113%); Custer County (110%); Fall River County (108%); Pennington County (106%); Harding County (105%); Minnehaha County (104%); Potter County (104%); Campbell County (103%); McPherson County (101%); Hamlin County (101%); Stanley County (101%); Lake County (100%); Perkins County (100%)

Tennessee: Williamson County (110%); Moore County (101%); Polk County (101%)

Texas: Loving County (187%); Presidio County (149%); McMullen County (147%); Brooks County (117%); Roberts County (116%); Sterling County (115%); Zapata County (115%); Maverick County (112%); Starr County (110%); King County (110%); Chambers County (109%); Irion County (108%); Jim Hogg County (107%); Polk County (107%); Comal County (106%); Oldham County (104%); Culberson County (104%); Kendall County (103%); Dimmit County (103%); Rockwall County (102%); Motley County (102%); Parker County (102%); Hudspeth County (101%); Travis County (101%); Fort Bend County (101%); Kent County (101%); Webb County (101%); Mason County (101%); Crockett County (101%); Waller County (100%); Gillespie County (100%); Duval County (100%); Brewster County (100%)

Vermont: Statewide (100%)

Virginia: Loudoun County (116%); Falls Church City (114%); Fairfax City (109%); Goochland County (108%); Arlington County (106%); Fairfax County (106%); Prince William County (105%); James City County (105%); Alexandria City (105%); Fauquier County (105%); Isle of Wight County (104%); Chesterfield County (104%); Surry County (103%); Hanover County (103%); New Kent County (103%); Clarke County (103%); King William County (102%); Spotsylvania County (102%); Rappahannock County (102%); Albemarle County (101%); Stafford County (101%); Northampton County (101%); Poquoson City (100%); Frederick County (100%)

Washington: Garfield County (119%); Pend Oreille County (112%); Jefferson County (111%); San Juan County (108%); Wahkiakum County (108%); Stevens County (103%); Pacific County (103%); Clark County (102%); Island County (102%); Klickitat County (102%); Thurston County (102%); Lincoln County (101%); Whatcom County (100%); Asotin County (100%)

*West Virginia: Mingo County (104%); Wyoming County (103%); McDowell County (102%); Brooke County (102%); Hancock County (100%)

My Comments:

One of the reasons the Democratic Party opposed the Citizenship question on the 2020 Census so adamantly is because the only way the Census population can be used in the future to spot obviously bloated voter registration polls is if the registered voters exceed the sum of the age-eligible citizens and the same age range of non-citizens, who cannot legally vote.  The Democratic Party, for all its pretense of claiming that every vote must count, has long had a strongly vested interest in inflated voter registration rolls.  Of course, every legal vote is watered down when the dead, the out of district, and non-citizens vote in an election.  The Democratic Party is not concerned with this.