Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today the nation pauses to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Always up for a photo-op, Democrats gather to hear Biden beat the dead horse of voting rights* and ignore that MLK was a Christian, a Republican and didn't lead riots in the street. King didn't march for equity, but equality. He had his battles with police, but I doubt he would support defunding them and hurting minority communities. He had his battles with the FBI and struggled with a bureaucratic, intrusive federal government, just as we do today. He would be thrilled with the huge advances Blacks made during the Trump administration. In fact, the MLK of the 1960s would probably not support the goals and mission of the Democrat party of 2023.

* Voter turn out for blacks was higher than whites in 2008 and 2012--there is no voting rights problem when there is someone they want to vote for. Biden doesn't attract them.

Speaking of photos, I tend to agree with those who are objecting to the new statue unveiled in Boston. Some say it's pornographic, including children and his relatives. "This is awful,” the British rapper and podcaster Zuby added in a tweet."

Two speeches, a defining moment in history

Peggy Noonan, whom I gave up on when she went all soft and gooey and swooned over Obama in 2008: 

"It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was AGGRESSIVE, INTEMPERATE, not only OFFENSIVE but meant to OFFEND. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges. (Wall Street Journal pay wall, but you get the idea Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point - WSJ )

In my opinion, I don't think Biden is able to think or comment like this.  His speech writers are all steeped and stewed in Critical Race Theory, which means they know nothing about American history.

Dave doesn’t vote

He’s concerned after watching MSNBC or some other anti-Trump source, that a woman of Ukrainian heritage lost her job in the administration and that Rudy was investigating corruption. But he doesn’t vote!  My response:

But you're OK with destroying the job of the Ukrainian prosecutor which Joe Biden bragged about (as a representative of Obama)? Biden demanded he be fired, or Ukraine would get no money to fight the Russians. He knew what would happen if the news got out about who was really manipulating the U.S. election.

Rudy was doing his job--investigating the corruption of the Democrats of the previous administration who tried to undo the election results of 2016.

You have a strange set of standards--don't vote, but support crooks widening the muck in the swamp. Voting is always a challenge--often the lesser of 2 evils. So is donating money to campaigns and candidates, but it's better than a monarchy or communism where there's no voting at all, or just straw man candidates. We see now Mitt Romney's true colors, but he still would have been better than a second term for Obama.

Thousands of years of human history under every imaginable form of government from human sacrifice to peasants rounded up from the fields to march to foreign wars, and the little guy finally has a say based on one of the finest constitution ever produced, and you thumb your nose at all the blood and treasure over centuries it took to get here because it isn't perfect. I'm shocked.

Delays and Democrats

More delays in Palm Beach County, and we know what that means, more Democrat votes will be found.  Whenever a batch of uncounted votes are found are they ever Republican? And Democrats want votes of non-citizens to be counted.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/10/palm-beach-county-democrats-argue-count-votes-cast-non-citizens/

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/11/10/what-the-hell-broward-and-palm-beach-counties-ignore-court-ruling-on-vote-counts-n2535700

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/local-govt--politics/blind-voters-claim-they-denied-right-secret-ballot/

The caravan has arrived on the border, people from Central America are climbing the fences and barriers, and it’s crickets from those who told us there is no caravan. I guess it was just an election season issue.  It will be catch and release as usual.  Can’t imagine why these people are called migrants.  Don’t know who paid for the buses.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/caravan-migrants-reach-tijuana-start-climbing-the-border-fence

https://dennismichaellynch.com/video-first-waves-of-caravan-migrants-reach-tijuana-immediately-climb-atop-border-fence/

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/10/19/migrant-caravan-reaches-southern-border-mexico/

Woman’s suffrage and the right to vote

I’ve now heard three lectures on Woman’s Suffrage and women getting the vote in 1920 at this week’s Lakeside Chautauqua Lecture series.  I used to think it was a very significant part of our history, but not any more.  Nothing really changed for women except voting rights that I can tell.  The parallel 19th and 20th century movements of women’s groups concerning property rights, education, custody of children, safer child birth, dress reform, public health, public libraries, Sunday schools for factory children, female ordination in churches, seminary attendance, temperance,  and general national movements including freedom to travel, mass production of automobiles, cooperative extension, lyceum, Chautauqua, voting in local  and municipal elections, and more technology for the home (sewing machines, indoor plumbing, electricity) had already greatly improved women’s lives by 1920. 

They did vote, by the millions, but not for women or even women’s issues for another 40-50 years. WWI had a much greater impact on women than the 1920 right to vote. Then it was the Great Depression and WWII that changed lives. Women never got to vote on abortion, or even same sex marriage.

Just to be clear, this is my opinion, not that of the lecturer. She believes the Right to Vote was very important. I'm happy I can vote--I just think that by 1920, it made little difference in the lives of women.