Executive Branch Corruption Prevention vs. Foreign Contributions of Value

The President of the United States of America is constitutionally tasked with enforcing the laws of the nation within its constitutionally delimited powers.  That enforcement function implies that he must not allow corruption within the Executive Branch.  It is his duty to root it out, reveal it, and prosecute it.

During the Obama presidency, his administration had numerous incidences that appeared to be examples of severe corruption and which he ought to have seriously investigated.  However, it is highly plausible that Obama was actually involved in some or all of these instances of very plausible corruption.  None of these corruption instances were properly investigated.  It is not unusual for an administration to fail to investigate instances of corruption for fear of embarrassment or for fear that they will lose votes in the next election because they were caught in their planned corruption.  This is especially true of the Democrat Party, whose corruption is commonly so pervasive that they cannot even be embarrassed by the fact of it and are only ever embarrassed by the ineptness that caused them to be overtly caught engaging in it.

Now let me give you a few of the very plausibly corrupt actions that occurred by politicians under the Obama administration:

• Lois Lerner and the IRS holding up more than a hundred Tea Party, Constitutional Government, and Patriot tax-exempt status requests which kept many of them from expounding policy arguments that the Democrat Socialist Party did not want Americans to hear before the 2012 election.
• The Uranium One, whose controlling ownership was Russian, but also partly Canadian, deal to buy American uranium which required the approval of several Obama agencies, including the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Prior to these approvals and during the approval process, huge donations were made to the Clinton Foundation by Uranium One officers and Bill Clinton was offered $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow at a meeting that recommended investments in Uranium One.
• Hillary Clinton stole more than 60,000 e-mails from the U.S. government while Secretary of State, routing them through an insecure server in the basement of one of her homes.  When these were demanded back, she destroyed about half of them, claiming they were only personal notes.  Even among those that were returned, numerous instances of information requiring secure handling were found.  The hard drive and other storage media for the e-mails had been destroyed, in violation of the legal requirement that the e-mails be returned to the government and for a proper investigation into security violations.  After Clinton had the e-mails destroyed she and the media pretended that Trump had called upon the Russians to steal these already destroyed e-mails.  This is the Democrat Socialist Party way to turn a violation of the law to advantage.  This invitation to steal narrative became part of the myth of Russian collusion by Trump.
• A deal was made by the Obama Attorney General Lynch with Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an airport not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her theft of the State Department e-mails and for any security violations.
• Violations of the FISA court requirements occurred at least four times in requests made by the Obama FBI and intelligence agencies for FISA warrants to spy upon the Trump presidential campaign.  This violation of law is at least as serious as the Watergate burglary that ended the Nixon presidency.  Numerous high-level Obama officials were involved in the Spygate scandal and were collaborating with the intelligence agencies and other persons in the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Ukraine and Italy.
• Vice President Joe Biden using his special envoy assignments with Ukraine and Red China to win sweetheart deals for relatives who had nothing to offer in exchange for large sums of money except the fact that they were related to Joe Biden.

Since Obama did not root out, reveal, and prosecute these likely cases of corruption under his administration, it is the very proper job that the following President do so.  Indeed, the following President would be slacking his responsibilities if he did not do so.

Ah, but note that in several of these cases there are actors from other countries.  During the 2016 election, had Trump actually received any useful information from the Russians on e-mails they may very well have stolen from Clinton's insecure home server, the Democrats would have said he had received something of value from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance laws!  This is a Get out of jail free card for a corrupt politician.  The same would have been true if Trump had received damning evidence against Clinton from a Canadian or a Russian source connected with Uranium One.

Now, the claim is being made that because Joe Biden is running for President, any evidence of his corrupt activities in Ukraine and China obtained by the Trump administration is something of value received from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance law.  So all a corrupt politician needs to do to be forever protected from investigations of his crimes is to be sure that the witnesses of his crimes are all foreigners and that he continue his political career without end so he can never be investigated and prosecuted.  What an incredible trick and the Democrat Socialist Party appears to have discovered its utility.  Corruption safe and forever.  Rather like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton staying married forever, so neither can ever be forced to testify to the crimes of the other.  The abuse of power through foreign corruption and a political career are a marriage made in heaven, apparently.

As always, context is extremely critical in rational thinking.  One can understand how the campaign finance laws came to be and their intent.  One can understand how those who wrote the laws may not have anticipated the way the Democrats are currently trying to use these laws to prevent the proof of corruption of some of their leading politicians.  The rational man must understand that any valid intent of the campaign finance laws was to prevent corruption, not to enable it.  

The rational man understands that no campaign finance law can stand in the way of a President's core constitutional functions to execute the laws with proper respect for the individual rights of every citizen and that must mean to do so without corruption.  A President must be free to root out, reveal, and prosecute corruption in the Executive Branch of the government.  And we must note that both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden may have been guilty of corruption as officials of the Obama administration.  That very plausible possibility needs to be seriously investigated and to do so requires that foreign actors be able to deliver information about their deeds to the present administration headed by President Trump.

The Climate Alarmists Oppose Air Conditioning

When it is hot outside in the developed nations, we turn on our air conditioners at home, at work, and in our cars.  This includes the alarmists who claim that greenhouse gases are dangerously warming the Earth.  Insofar as the Earth should warm, we would use more air-conditioning to mitigate its troublesome effects.  But no, we are now told that the current generation of refrigerants cannot be used because they are greenhouse gases.  Those who are convinced that the Earth is catastrophically warming want to disarm many by making air-conditioning much more expensive.

Let us examine the background of this story.  The Montreal Protocol, ratified as a global environmental treaty by the U.S. Senate in 1988, restricted the production of refrigerants then in use because they were said to be destroying ozone.  Bill Clinton's Dept. of Energy also required air-conditioners to become 30% more efficient, which required larger and more expensive air-conditioners.  I remember well because I had to replace a home air-conditioning system with a much more expensive one using the new refrigerants that replaced the restricted ones.  I also had problems with the refrigerant in the air-conditioner in my well-used and aged car.  I was not happy with my government for causing me these problems.

Now we come to the present crisis.  The Obama people decided that the Montreal Protocol should be used to force the end of the production of the supposedly ozone-friendly refrigerants developed to replace the less expensive and highly effective refrigerants that preceded the Montreal Protocol.  The new refrigerants developed by Honeywell and Chemours and others will replace refrigerants priced at $6 per pound with refrigerants priced at more than $70 per pound.  Home air-conditioner units may use 15 pounds of refrigerant at a cost of more than $1050 for the new refrigerants.  Honeywell and Chemours and other refrigerant manufacturers are lobbying hard to have the U.S. government force us to replace our current air-conditioners once again and replace them with air-conditioners using their newly developed gold-plated refrigerants.  The reason is the terrifying prospect of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Except, there is no catastrophic man-made global warming.  Carbon dioxide has a trivial effect on the Earth's surface temperatures.  Whatever effect the present generation of refrigerants has is trivial in comparison to the trivial effect of carbon dioxide.  But, never let a potential scare tactic go unused when someone can profit from it.  And what is a government for if not to provide the means to force the People to do as some special interest group wants them to do.  In this case, we are to be forced to make it easy for the producers of the new air-conditioning units and the new refrigerants to make a killing in the air-conditioning market.

Perhaps the added costs of air-conditioning will then reinforce the claim that global warming would be a catastrophe, making many environmentalists very happy.  That would provide them with hopes of an easier path to gaining even more power over the People.  Meanwhile, the Democrats who most further these environmentalist power games will be degrading the lives of Americans and others around the world, most especially the poor who can least afford the new gold-plated air-conditioning systems.  Once again, the Democrats have put the lie on their pretended care for the poor and the less fortunate among us.  There is no statement more terrifying than that of the Democrats saying that they are the party that cares for you.  When they do that, they really mean that they intend to subjugate you.  They are saying they have a place for you on their plantation.  In this case, a hot place with no air-conditioning.

A Most Conveniently Pliable Weapons of Mass Destruction Definition

The radical Islamists who bombed the families watching the Boston Marathon have been accused of using weapons of mass destruction by the Justice Department of the Obama Democrat Regime.  I have no problem with this as a manifestation of reality.

But is it not most interesting that when a couple of radical Islamists in the United States use a home-made bomb or two, these are weapons of mass destruction, but when Saddam Hussein used anti-aircraft missiles, hundreds of tanks, and thousands of artillery pieces against American and allied forces, he had no weapons of mass destruction according to the same Democrats of the present regime in Washington.

Perhaps the necessary scale for a weapon of mass destruction is lowered when it is used against civilians.  OK, then what about when Saddam used chemical weapons against entire Kurd villages or he used artillery against the majority southern Iraqis he suppressed?

So, Saddam Hussein with many billions of dollars of oil money and the willingness to lavish it on his military of regime supporters to suppress the majority of the Iraqi population had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but two not very rich and not very bright young guys in Boston did have Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Democrats have a most pliable definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Indeed, they are loaded with pliable definitions.  Who can forget that it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is?  Who can forget that oral sex is not sex?  Who can forget that a leading Weatherman terrorist is just a guy in the neighborhood?  Who can forget that Obama's spiritual mentor had widely known negative opinions of the USA that Obama had never heard about?  Or how about the meaning of you can keep your health insurance plan if you want to?  Or that ObamaCare will bend down the curve of health care costs, in which down apparently means as seen when viewed from an alternative universe which is a mirror image to our own?  Who but a Democrat would have thought to view that critically important issue from the perspective of some string theorist's alternative universe?  Which brings us right back to "It all depends on what the meaning of "is" is."  For Democrats it is that which provides them with more power to control our lives or which in any other way is convenient to them.

Obama and Bill Clinton Not Allowed to Own Guns

It is a popular belief that current gun laws should be better enforced.  Federal law already makes it illegal for any felon or anyone who has illegally used any controlled substance from owning a gun.  The penalty is five years of imprisonment, the same draconian punishment leveled at those who refuse to consent to having the ownership of their own bodies taken over by the government under the collectivist ObamaCare law.

Felons are a very broad category which more and more includes people who committed no crime of violence or even no crime against any known individual at all.  Federal and state laws have more and more made people felons for violating vague, unknown, and irrational laws and regulations aimed at anyone trying to make a living.  Business owners and business managers are particularly likely to be victims of such wrongheaded laws.  Those who have have been convicted under such specious laws are not allowed to own guns.

The prohibition of gun ownership to anyone who has illegally used a controlled substance is another draconian act that has the consequence that at least 40 million Americans are likely prohibited from owning guns if it were enforced.  Among those who are prohibited by federal law from owning guns are:

Obama
George W. Bush
Bill Clinton

Of course in our lawless land in which many people are deemed too important for the law to be enforced upon them, these people would not actually be denied a gun permit should they request one.  Law enforcement would definitely turn its head for them.  But, in a nation in which the use of a prohibited substance lands many others in jail, prevents them from holding many jobs, or is the excuse of law enforcement agencies to take their homes, cars, boats, and land from them without the need to get a conviction, this is a giant hypocrisy.  It is an act of great injustice.

Far from needing still more gun ownership prohibition and registration laws, we need to repeal some of the wrongheaded laws we already have that unreasonably infringe upon our sovereign and equal right to protect ourselves from harm by others, including tyrannical governments.  More of us than are presently allowed should be able to acquire the best in personal protection weapons so that we can protect ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors from the violence that the state proves unable and unwilling to prevent.  Proposed restrictions against large capacity, actually just reasonable capacity, magazines and semi-automatic fire weapons are clear infringements of our right to protect ourselves.

Before you know it, Obama will dictatorially rule that the Founding Fathers only intended the citizenry to own muzzle-loaded muskets and that will be all we will be allowed to own.  Provided of course that we have not become felons for violating some line buried in hundreds of thousands of pages of federal laws and regulations or that we have not ever used a controlled substance illegally.

14th Amendment Gives President Authority to Raise the Debt Ceiling: Another Socialist Taradiddle

Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin, Representative Peter Welch, and numerous Progressive Elitist columnists have called upon Obama to raise the debt ceiling himself using the 14th Amendment as the basis for his power to do so.  Examining this claim of presidential power by the socialist left will inform us greatly about their values and how seriously they take the Constitution.

In Article 1, Section 8, the Congress is given its powers.  It says:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; ....

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, ...

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; ....

Section 8 also goes on to describe its role in the defense of the country, including that of providing for military forces and placing a two-year appropriations limit on its doing so.

The powers of the President are given in Article 2, Section 2.  There is no mention of any power to appropriate money, to issue debt, to issue coin or bonds, or any other power pertaining to the use of the People's money.  This is not surprising given that control over money, taxes, and debt were the primary powers that the Congress was invested with for the purpose of limiting the power of the Executive.  We have to remember that Americans had just fought for their independence from a much too powerful King of England.  They had also faced too powerful governors in the colonies in most cases who ruled those colonies for the King's advantage, not the People's welfare.  The Executive under the Articles of Confederation had been nearly non-existent and was much strengthened under the Constitution, but was still subject to great distrust.  Were we as wise today, we would still view the Executive with great distrust.

The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868 to deal with issues resulting from the outcome of the Civil War.  In Section 4, it says:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.  But neither the United States or any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or the emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5 of the 14th Amendment says "Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

So whatever power is granted here is granted to Congress.  There is no mention of the President.  What is more, the debt to be honored without question, was only such debt as had been authorized by law, which only Congress can do.  One can go further in understanding this amendment's requirement about the debt.  It is clear that it imposes an obligation upon Congress to pay its debts in full and without dilution.  A rational person would question repayment of a debt with a devalued currency, for instance.  Therefore, if Congress, or in our present condition, the Federal Reserve is printing money to make up the difference between tax revenues and government spending, then Congress itself is in violation of the 14th Amendment.  Any rational broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment would note that Congress is constrained in its spending to a sustainable debt.  It cannot default on the debt, but it also cannot allow the debt to rise to such heights that a rational person would question that it can be repaid in full with a fully valued coin.

As we see, it is a ludicrous taradiddle that the President can raise the debt ceiling without an act of Congress.  There is no such power in the 14th Amendment.  This is why even Obama has been disinclined to claim this power.  Even though he dislikes the Constitution and holds it in low regard, even he dares not traduce it is such a blatant manner.  Not only would he have to assert a power he clearly does not have, but he would also have to violate multiple acts of Congress, duly passed.  First, he would have to break the law setting the current debt ceiling, as Congress has been doing since 1917.  Second, he would have to violate the Antideficiency Act which states that the President or any government official must have an appropriation from Congress before he can authorize payments.  It could not be more obvious that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the President.

This being such an open and shut case, it is very revealing that so many of the top leadership of the Democrat Party are so eager to subvert the Constitution and support such an egregious taradiddle as the claim that the 14th Amendment gives their great socialist leader the power to raise the debt ceiling by himself.  This is an attempt to claim dictatorial powers.  If Republicans had made such a claim when the Democrats controlled one of the houses of the Congress, you can be certain they would have been screaming in opposition.  It is way beyond time for the American People to understand that their dominant party is one eager to subvert the Constitution and thereby the control the people exercise by choosing their representatives to the Congress.  There is an eagerness for dictatorship, so long as the dictator is a Democrat Socialist.  This is a predilection to be feared and against which we must stand in firmest opposition.

taradiddle: 1) a trivial or childish lie, a fib, or 2) pretentious nonsense.

The Most Naive People in America

The Pew Research Center conducted a poll released on 18 April 2010 based upon four surveys conducted from 11 March to 11 April of about 5,500 adults reached on land and cell phone lines.  22% of the people said they trust Washington almost always or most of the time.  Apparently, the most naive and gullible people in America are this 22% of the adult population!  Only 19% said they are basically content with the federal government.  So, only about one in five Americans are happy with the federal government.

Since the 1950s, there have been only two periods with similar levels of distrust.  From 1992 to 1995, the first term of Bill Clinton and following on the heels of the George H. W. Bush "read my lips" tax increases, those trusting Washington fell to 17%.  From 1978 to 1980, the last years of Jimmy Carter's administration, those retaining trust in Washington fell to a low of 25%.

Today's adults were mostly born between the Census' of 1920 and 1990.  Of course some adults born in that time-frame have died and are not included in the Pew poll.  To keep things simple, we will ignore that for the following calculation.  How many people have been born per minute on average in that time?  The answer is about 3.88 per minute.  If 22% of these people are suckers, then the old saying that a sucker is born every minute is nearly true, but Americans are a wee bit better than that.  Apparently about 0.85 suckers are born every minute.

About half the people said they wanted smaller government, which is fewer than those saying this in other recent surveys.  About 40% want government to provide more services.  The Pew Center does tend to produce results slightly more favorable to the left than many polls over the years, in my opinion.