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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, July 31, 2022

In Chicago, a district attorney quits, saying he can't work in an office 'I don't respect'

What is it about far-left wokester district attorneys and the chaotic way they run their offices? We see this a lot. Here's the latest bit of such evidence from the office of one of Soros's finest, Chicago's radical district attorney, Kim Foxx:...............The man said he wished he could stay, but that was impossible, because not only did he have "zero confidence" in Foxx's leadership, but he couldn't work for an office "I don't respect." .............It comes on the heels of an entire police force resigning from a North Carolina town after a wokester city manager made working conditions unbearable for the related field of law enforcement, and just weeks after voters in left-wing San Francisco voted to throw San Francisco's wokester district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office, in a move that was preceded by mass resignations from the working district attorneys there.  There also have been mass resignations from Los Angeles's Soros-backed district attorney, George Gascon, who faces a recall of his own...........To Read More....

 My Take - You may wish to review my files on:  Patricia McCarthy says it all, The Four Horsemen of our Apocalypse: George Soros, Xi Jinping, Bill Gates, and Joe Biden

Saturday, July 30, 2022

P&D and The Week That Was

By Rich Kozlovich
 
Other than Monday's edition of P&D, the rest of the week has short lists but some good commentaries.  Have a good weekend. 
 

P&D Today Friday, July 29, 2022

 Political Cartoons by Chip Bok

P&D Today Thursday, July 28, 2022

 Political Cartoons by Gary Varvel

P&D Today Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 Political Cartoons by Margolis & Cox

P&D Today Tuesday, July 26, 2022

 Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

P&D Today Monday, July 25, 2022

 

Friday, July 29, 2022

P&D Today

By Rich Kozlovich

 Political Cartoons by Chip Bok

 

This is really a short list today with just three commentaries.  

 Enjoy!

 

 

The Old World Order

July 27, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

When President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech to Congress envisioning the emergence of a “new world order”, he had it backward. The new world order wasn’t emerging, it was over.

A "new world", Bush claimed, "is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known" and he shared that vision with Gorbachev. The Soviet Leader, a year away from being toppled, who had cut his teeth on Communist visions of a new world being born only to inherit a failing system that could no longer win wars or feed its own people, must have been amused.

Gorbachev understood what Bush did not, that no new world order was coming, an old world order was returning. Bush lasted a year longer in office than his Soviet counterpart. And yet his own farewell speech couldn’t help but echo Bush, declaring, “we live in a new world now.”

The new world we live in now is one where Russia is trying to rebuild a Czarist empire, and China, Iran, and every other power or power that was, is fighting to recreate its glory days.

The patchwork international order had been a product of the Cold War that Bush and Gorbachev were eagerly bidding farewell to. Globalism, or the post-Cold War international order based on trade, human rights and conferences proved to be as much of a joke as the UN, the WTO, the NGOs and the multilateral organizations that served as its shaky infrastructure.

Bush envisioned "a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle" and "nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice" on the brink of the original Gulf War.

But the only law that ever existed was the law of force enforced by self-interest or idealism.

Last year, Secretary of State Blinken declared that human rights would be at the center of our foreign policy, but that other nations would have to make it happen. “Promoting respect for human rights is not something we can do alone, but is best accomplished working with our allies and partners across the globe,” he claimed. The chosen venue for the job was the Human Rights Council whose members include China, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Venezuela.

As the old political gag goes, "These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others."

The new world order means world leaders gathering for a NATO summit that accomplishes nothing except the indignity of Finland and Sweden having to bribe an Islamist butcher in Turkey for the privilege of membership in the hope that if Russia comes for them, we’ll defend them.

In the real world, Finland will be on its own just as it was against the USSR and Germany.

The old world order is the reality that once the meetings are done and the conferences are over, every country is all alone. Virtue signaling globalism means that everyone will fly Ukrainian flags, just as they expressed solidarity with Hong Kong and will hashtag Taiwan at need.

And then they’ll move on to the next political outrage, celebrity gossip or trending news.

In his address on September 11, 1990, Bush called Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the “first assault on the new world that we seek, the first test of our mettle.” The first test also proved to be the last. The Iraq wars would shatter any bipartisan and multilateral appetite for American interventions. Obama’s Syrian red line, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine all mark the slow collapse of the potemkin village erected in the nineties.

The myth of a new world order and its illusion of collective security is worse than the reality of the old world order, offering popular protesters and small countries the false hope that some international consensus or military intervention will come to their aid when help isn’t coming.

Instead of 19th century realpolitik or late 20th century internationalism, we have a much more expensive and imaginary version of the League of Nations. Countless billions of dollars and endless hours are spent propping up an imaginary new world order of a world without war when it would be much healthier for us and for everyone else to acknowledge that none of it is real.

The world isn’t governed by law, but by force, and no one is coming to save anyone. Not us.

The United States isn’t entirely out of the intervention business, but our international forces are deployed for deterrence purposes. Rather than fighting to change things, we are managing the decline. That’s what our troops were doing in Afghanistan for at least a decade, trying to keep one of our old potemkin villages, a “democratic” government, from its inevitable defeat and fall.

Other powers and movements, from Russia and China to Sunni and Shiite Islam, are expanding while America remains committed to a failed vision of a static world. A shrinking West, avidly being colonized by the rest of the world, touts decolonization. But the West has few colonies, instead its cities, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto, are rapidly becoming third world colonies.

America first embraced the ideal of a new world order when it ceased to expand territorially. A century of wars for democracy, along with drastically falling birth rates, convinced Europe to cease its expansionism, but the rest of the world has not decided to be happy with what it has.

World powers seek to restore or build empires, carving up regions into spheres of influence, intimidating, invading, and conquering smaller nations. That old world order was always the defining reality. The Cold War era incorporated it into a larger struggle against Communism, but afterward, the same ugliness continued stripped of any pretense of a world revolution.

With the old world order, the United States can continue to impotently preach Bush’s vision of Americans, “together with Arabs, Europeans, Asians, and Africans in defense of principle and the dream of a new world order” or think about what an American future really looks like.

One in which America is no longer declining or tethered to maintaining an illusory new order.

A century of tired arguments have reduced us to the false choice between isolationism and internationalism. But at the height of our rising power in the 19th century, the United States was neither. It was not afraid of asserting its ideals, but neither was it foolish enough to believe that the rest of the world would go along or that we were obligated to make them all behave. We primarily pursued our own interests and we were not afraid of a little expansionism either.

Most importantly, we did not see our place in the world as bound by the rest of the world.

American foreign policy has come to be a prisoner of a global construct. Its exponents have shouldered a global burden that no empire in history has ever been able to carry. Americans have been told to take on the responsibility for the freedom and happiness of the entire world. Our national policy is to first conceive of how the world should be and then try to bring it about.

But a better world doesn’t begin with American self-sacrifice, but with a greater America.

America can best serve the world by being itself. The new world order never really existed and pretending that it did does no favors to the countries who might actually depend on it. Instead of trying to mobilize the world, America can provide a meaningful alternative for the world.

The American Revolution and the Constitution ushered in the true new world order not by seeking to control the world, but by showing the human race what was possible. Every effort to outdo that order with a new world order has failed. And Bush’s, like Gorbachev’s, has joined the trash heap of history. The real new world order is not one that envisions a transformed humanity, but that empowers individuals, not nations, not from the top, but from the bottom.

The constitutional order is not the end of history, but the beginning of humanity.

Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  Click here to subscribe to my articles.

Thank you for reading.

The New "Forward Party" is the Embrace of an Anaconda

By Rich Kozlovich

Some years ago I predicted the Democrats and the Republicans were going to have splits in each party and form a third party.  However, I thought would start with the Republicans instead of the Democrats because my view was the term "moderate Democrat" was an oxymoron, and there could never be a merging of the two.  Make no mistake, there aren't enough moderate Democrats to make a difference, but there are a lot of foolish Republicans.  At any rate I outlined my views on this third party potential in these two articles:

As it turns out, its being started by the Democrats who have found their party has become so radical and so extreme in their views and policies many were uncomfortable being Democrats, but they just couldn't bring themselves to become Republicans, or Independents. Why? Because they still embraced socialist concepts.  But that doesn't make them moderates, and all of them have a screw loose, right along with the Never Trump Republicans.

As for the Republicans, there no longer was a place in the leadership for Never Trumpers such as John Kasich, Mitt Romney and others, or in the influence peddling positions held by George Will, Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, and others, who would potentially embrace a new party with "disturbed" Democrats, (no pun intended, although valid) because philosophically they are in reality moderate Democrats who embrace the same concepts of big government as the Democrats, and just might come together and form a third party, totally embraced by leftists.  Which is like being embraced by a bone crushing anaconda. 

Only it never happened, until now.  It seems I was ahead of the curve because now Democrat Andrew Yang has managed to form a party with disturbed Democrats and disaffected Republicans.

Over the last couple of days I've been getting e-mails such as this:  Former Republicans and Democrats form new third U.S. political party, saying:

Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system.

The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey.............dozens of former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump; the Forward Party, founded by Yang, who left the Democratic Party in 2021 and became an independent; and the Serve America Movement, a group of Democrats, Republicans and independents whose executive director is former Republican congressman David Jolly.......

 The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward."

Well, one of my favorite, and amazingly prolific writers is Andrea Widburg, who in 2021 noted in her article, There's nothing moderate about Andrew Yang, saying:

they need to rewrite that "motto: “Not Right. Sort of Left. Stupid.”  I say that based upon his “platform,” which is truly awful."' 

Back in 2021 apparently they had "specific policies" outlined in their home page, but this new party’s home page has been washed of anything but meaningless phrases such as:

  • Discover, Fearlessly seek diverse and new ideas.
  • Design, Come together around sensible solutions. 
  • Deliver, Yes actually do something. 
  • Move Forward Together

And all that means what?  It means abandoning traditional values and adopting any leftist philosophical flavor of the day that takes away your money, and the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.  The left understands that, but this is designed to fool the public with clever undefined phrases.  

However, when she wrote that article the web site apparently did  have specific policies outlined, including:

1.“Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries.” Both are horrific ideas. Ultimately, under ranked-choice voting, there’s never a clear majority winner

2. Universal Basic Income..... Spreading a thin layer of unearned money across the entire economy just drives up prices as the market adjusts to an influx of money.

3. Fact based governance.  Yang is in on both abortion and the promise that government solutions will save us from this imaginary anthropogenic climate change.  The reality is that ideologies inevitably underlie governance......

4.  $100 tax rebate to all Americans, whether they pay taxes or not.

I followed him a bit during his failed efforts to become the Mayor of New York City, and the philosophical difference between him and the far left is they same distance between paper and a paper clip, only he wasn't in charge.  That's what this is all about. 

Now, the silver lining.  

This midterm election for the Republicans is RINO hunting, as the base wants rid of them in the primaries.  However, if they voluntarily leave the party so much the better.  That spares the nation of having to hear a lot of gaseous and clabberous horsepucky from the left and the RINO's.   

This will split the Democrats far more than the Republicans, and will divide their voting bloc.  A voting bloc that would never vote for a Republican....ever.   End result.  More conservatives will be elected, so I say, go Andrew go, with your, Not Right. Sort of Left. Stupid, party.  You do the nation a great service.

 

The Ongoing Disaster Of NYCHA: Why It's A Mistake Ever To Start Down The Road To Socialism

December 08, 2021 @ Manhattan Contrarian  

Editor's Note: This was tucked away in my draft file and forgotten, until now, and is still worth viewing.  RK

NYCHA — the New York City Housing Authority to local cognoscenti — has been one of my favorite topics over the years. For a sampling of prior posts see here, here, here and here.

Multiple factors make NYCHA a core subject matter for this blog. First, it is one of the most prominent and largest examples in the U.S. of a major enterprise that operates on a very pure socialist model, with full public ownership of the assets and distribution of the “benefits” (deeply discounted housing units) on the basis of perceived “need.” Second, NYCHA has failed catastrophically, and for all the reasons that socialist endeavors are always doomed to inevitable failure. Third, NYCHA has demonstrated an ability to coerce for itself one taxpayer-funded rescue after another, making it an excellent illustration of the seeming inability to ever get rid of, or even scale back, a socialist failure, no matter how obvious or how disastrous it may be or how much it costs to keep it going. And finally, NYCHA illustrates the exploitation of ongoing failure as a way to enrich the well-connected cronies of politicians.

Previous posts here have reported how, after a few decades of incompetent and/or deferred maintenance and upgrades, NYCHA had managed to dig itself into a huge financial hole. In 2015 NYCHA came out with a report admitting that it had an immediate need for about $17 billion to fix its buildings, and no way to collect that from tenants through rents. With around 170,000 apartments, this would be around $100,000 per apartment. But then the $17 billion started to grow, first to $25 billion, and then to $32 billion, and in the most recent iteration to about $40 billion. Now we are at well over $200,000 per apartment. I have seen reports that Senator Schumer has inserted a $40 billion earmark into the so-called “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill to cover this full amount. But that massive giveaway may or may not ever pass.

So now for the latest: A week ago, on December 1, New York City announced a deal with two developers to do a comprehensive rehabilitation and upgrade of two specific large NYCHA projects in the West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The two NYCHA projects in question are the Robert Fulton Houses and the Chelsea-Elliott Houses. The headline of the City press release reads:

 “THE NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY AND RESIDENT LEADERS ANNOUNCE THE SELECTION OF ESSENCE DEVELOPMENT AND THE RELATED COMPANIES TO PROVIDE APPROXIMATELY $366 MILLION IN COMPREHENSIVE REPAIRS AND INVESTMENTS FOR 2,054 APARTMENTS IN THE CHELSEA SECTION OF MANHATTAN THROUGH THE PACT PROGRAM.”

Wow! That sounds great. What’s not to like? Actually, everything about this deal is terrible for the City and its taxpayers. Nor is the deal anything good for the residents of the projects, but that is another issue — they have been bought into permanent dependency. Nevertheless, in the real world, I will probably be the only person speaking out against this.

First, some background that will be particularly informative for readers not familiar with Manhattan. The Chelsea neighborhood is on the West Side of Manhattan from about 14th Street to 34th Street. It was developed in connection with the commercial port activities that were the dominant industry in New York in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After World War II, the port went into rapid decline, as did the associated businesses and buildings in the blocks near the Hudson River. By the 1960s — that’s when the Fulton and Chelsea-Elliott Houses were built — the area was a mostly-derelict backwater.

But at some point Chelsea became increasingly fashionable. The older buildings got upgraded, and fancy new condos got built. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a two bedroom apartment in Chelsea for under $3 million to buy, or $4000/month to rent. Diagonally right across the street from the Fulton Houses at 9th Avenue and 16th Street we have the New York headquarters of Google (previously the very largest of the warehouse buildings of the area, built by the New York Port Authority).

According to this website covering New York City commercial real estate, the assessment of this building is over $1 billion (market value would probably be well over $2 billion), and the property taxes on this one building for the 2021-22 year come to some $48.5 million. If you used Google today, I thank you as a New York City taxpayer.

And then, literally right across the street, we have the Fulton Houses. This morning I wandered over there (it’s about a 10 minute walk from where I live) and took this picture of a part of the complex:

Aside from being painfully ugly and in poor condition, the most remarkable thing about this project is that it has no value. And by no value, I mean zero. Hey, this is socialism. Apartments there cannot be bought or sold for any price, but instead get handed out by government functionaries according to some socialist concept of fairness. (Go through a 25 year waiting line, or alternatively try to jump the queue by making yourself homeless.) While Google pays nearly $50 million in property taxes per year for its 3+ acres across the street, these buildings (along with Chelsea-Elliott), sitting on as much or more land, pay no property taxes at all, and instead have a declared need for almost $400 million in rehabilitation that must be paid by someone else. Rents from existing tenants won’t pay any meaningful part of that.

And thus the newly announced deal. Two developers have been “selected” through a politicized process to rehabilitate the buildings. The cost is said to be $366 million for a little over 2000 apartments — more than $180,000 per apartment. The developers will do the renovations, and after those are completed, will manage the projects.

The lead developer is Related Companies, one of the City’s biggest, and best-connected, developers. The other developer is an MBE (Minority Business Enterprise) that Related cleverly brought into the process.

Are the developers putting in even a dime of their own money? Funny, but nothing in the press release mentions a thing about that, or about where the money is coming from, other than that this is part of the New York City PACT (“Permanent Affordability Commitment Together”) program. Here’s an article from Real Estate Weekly on December 1 with some more information. Again there is no suggestion that the developers are putting up any of the $366 million. Instead, that will come from City and federal funds:

New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC), the local housing finance agency, will assemble the financing and provide asset management and compliance for the PACT transactions. The balance of the repair bill will come via PACT through the federal government’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, or RAD, an Obama-era program that allows private companies to manage public housing, giving them responsibility for maintenance, repairs and rent collection.

So Related puts up nothing, and undoubtedly gets fees for the rehab, plus an ongoing management contract. Oh, and then there’s the right to put up a new building, and potentially several more such, on the NYCHA land.

Once the work is done to the tenants’ satisfaction, the developers will get to build a new 100-unit apartment building on West 27th Street . . . While today’s announcement only confirmed one new ground-up building that will rise on 27th Street, NYCHA has said in the past that potential new developments could add up to 700 units to the four sites that make up the complexes, half of which, under the deal, would be income-restricted affordable housing.

And what about property taxes on the new building(s)? Funny, there’s no mention of that either. Draw your own conclusions. These people from Related are very well-connected, and they are not stupid.

So Related puts up nothing and makes out like a bandit. New York has lost for at least another generation the opportunity to get rid of these eyesore buildings and use this very valuable land for some productive economic purpose. And a few thousand people get to live a deeply-subsidized life in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, but as permanent dependents of the state.

The subsidy to the existing tenants, if measured by the prices of comparable rental apartments in the neighborhood, would come to at least $50,000 per year per apartment, or $100 million per year for the 2000 apartments in question. Between that loss and the foregone property taxes, there would be plenty of money here to buy out all the existing tenants at prices they would be happy to take, and remove them from state dependency. Maybe buy each of them a fully-paid no-mortgage house in a low cost market like upstate Syracuse or Utica.

But that’s not how it works here. For us, it’s a moral imperative to provide “permanently affordable” apartments at enormous cost in ridiculously expensive neighborhoods. Why? I don’t know.

Even the New York Post this morning was on board with praising this deal:

The deal is a definite “win” for the tenants at Fulton-Chelsea Houses and another success for [NYCHA head] Russ as he strives to save NYCHA . . . .

What about this is worth saving?

Thursday, July 28, 2022

P&D Today

By Rich Kozlovich
Political Cartoons by Gary Varvel

Here were some comments to articles dealing with the insanity of what's called the Biden Administration from various news sites I saved and organized below:

We have a Democrat President who is slipping into dementia.  We have a Democrat majority in the House and the Senate. "How stupid do they think we are?" They have every right to believe a majority of voters are dumb as a stick. A fact already established. Yes, we can't forget, the (stupid) US voting public put us here.  They did this because:

  • Lousy public education system
  • Celebrity influence
  • Technology as controlled by the few, who happen to be mostly left-wingers. 
  • College educated white women who vote their feelings without bothering to check their brains.
  • A Republican Party that has no stones. 

The Democrat Party is a consortium of freaks, traitors, misfits, welfare beggars, globalists, communists, perverts, nihilists, abortion fanatics, race hustlers, and so on. Their numerous factions have nothing in common with each other except a lust for power. 

Some of them know they’re causing inflation, and they like it because they like anything that hurts America. 

Some of them are idiots and honestly have no idea how and why inflation happens. 

 Some of them are in single minded pursuit of some goal such as wrecking the Supreme Court, and they honestly don’t care a particle about inflation. 

The rest care for nothing but keeping the Democrat herd together.

Now there are some who might think that's unkind, but is it the truth?  That's a question everyone needs to ask and answer, since the truth isn't kind or unkind, it's just the truth. 
 

My Commentary

Commentaries

Other Posts: Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War