The Political Slant

America has always been a land of opportunity; especially for people of other nations who, through no fault of their own, had no other opportunities. As Bill Murray described in the movie “Stripes” about Americans: “We’re still a nation of loyal, sometimes lovable mutts whose forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.” 

Warning: I am not endorsing Donald Trump for any political position.

Some Democrats have weaponized the law, with the trial of former president Donald Trump. Federal officials declined from prosecuting Trump, mainly because of the statute of limitations, which had run out. The New York district attorney decided that if the crimes were raised to felonies, the violations of law were still within the range of prosecution under New York law. 

While I’m not a lawyer, it seems that most prosecutions need to have a victim. Trump’s prosecution didn’t seem to have any. One of the “witnesses” former porn star Stormy Daniels, mostly testified that she was paid to have “relations” with Trump, and that she was paid to keep quiet about it.

Trump had bodyguards at the time, and none of them were available to verify her testimony. It seems to me that one of those bodyguards could have been subpoenaed by the prosecution to verify this tryst. There was no point in Trump calling the bodyguard in question, because, logically, it is difficult, if not impossible, to verify something that didn’t happen. You can’t verify a negative very easily, if at all. Perhaps Trump’s lack of presenting the testimony of one of his bodyguards proves his guilt, but then, again, verifying something didn’t happen is quite difficult. You can only prove what happened, not what didn’t happen. (Proving something didn’t happen is a logical fallacy, by the way.)

Interestingly enough, Stormy Daniels was interviewed by Bill Mahr in 2018, and her description of that encounter in that interview resembled nothing like what she testified at the trial.

In an April 22, 2024 article in The Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley described the mentality of college students. If you give “safe spaces’ to college students, soon they will insist that entire groups have their own spaces, and then professors as well as speakers from outside the college be silenced because the students disapprove of what the professor or visitor is saying. The new intellectual elite are incapable of hearing anything that disagrees with their unquestionably correct ideology.  This permissive attitude toward students soon  leads to high grades without work,  and eventually college graduates who insist that they will only work thirty hours a week; for full-time pay, of course. As my law professor described, this is the “slippery slope” situation, where you indulge one behavior and many more follow, in tyrannical abuse of your original intent.

Presidents have ignored rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States for quite some time. In order that you understand the context of events, the following paragraphs offer some perspective. The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1832, decided the case Worcester v. Georgia (31 U.S. 515).  The question before the court was: Does the state of Georgia have the authority to regulate the intercourse between citizens of its state and members of the Cherokee Nation?

The answer was: No.

“In an opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court held that the Georgia act, under which Worcester was prosecuted, violated the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States. Noting that the “treaties and laws of the United States contemplate the Indian territory as completely separated from that of the states; and provide that all intercourse with them shall be carried on exclusively by the government of the union,” Chief Justice Marshall argued, “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.” The Georgia act thus interfered with the federal government’s authority and was unconstitutional.

Arizona lawmaker Alex Kolodin cosponsored SB1291, a critical piece of legislation that was signed into law last year in the state, which improved constitutional protections for probate victims and their families. 

Behind the many issues facing Americans is a problem that is fast becoming nationally recognized: probate piracy and denial of Constitutional rights. 

This is when the government and self-interested parties engage in strategies to legally deem Americans “incompetent” to manage their own affairs, and open them to probate litigation. When this occurs a person can lose all of their rights and have their life savings and property taken over by court-ordered attorneys, guardians, and fiduciaries.

by Marilyn W. Thompson, with research contributions from Ryann Grochowski Jones.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

In Washington and other states, independent redistricting commissions have fallen prey to partisanship, just like the legislative bodies they were meant to replace.

Washington state’s mapmakers had been working for almost a year to draw the lines that would shape the state’s elections for the next decade. Now they had five hours until the midnight deadline and they’d made little progress.

Many of the “Progressives” in the U.S. were the protestors of the 1960s. The Baby Boomers, numbering 76 million, as identified in demographics from 1946 to 1964, were quite vocal and resistant to the American values in which they were raised. To be fair, they had never seen the economic hardships of the 1920s and 1930s; they were raised in a consumer economy, a materialistic culture that was an economic gift to their parents and a curse to them. One of, if not the biggest influence was a college education, which, according to Inside Higher Ed, the “undergraduate enrollments increased 45 percent between 1945 and 1960, then doubled again by 1970.”

Certainly the U.S. was not a perfect society where the Boomers grew up, but when compared to other nations, the Boomers in the U.S. grew up with a prosperity that their parents could only imagine. That freedom and prosperity was threatened by the Vietnam War, where fifty-five thousand American young men perished for reasons that, in an historical perspective, seem pointless.

Somewhere the radicals realized that it wasn’t hip to resist authority; it was better to be authority.

In order that my readers do not think I am some conspiracy theorist, I like to cite reliable sources.  From Statista, as of April 26, 2023, COVID-19 killed 1,130,662 in the United States. I mean, mistakes happen, right? Many of those listed as succumbing to the virus had refused to be vaccinated, and subsequently were infected and died. Many of the “Anti-Vaxers” who became infected and perished were rather famous in denying the effectiveness of the vaccine; they were dead wrong, and life goes on without them. As much as I hate to say it, I feel little sympathy for the “conspiracy theorists” who perished; they were wrong, and now they are dead wrong.

Twenty-one year old Jack Teixeira, a guardsman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, has been arrested and accused of revealing classified national defense information. According to The Guardian (not affiliated with the Massachusetts Air National Guard as far as I know) Teixeira took secret documents home, photographed them and posted them on 4chan and Telegram internet sites.

It’s a big deal because of this: Releasing classified information reveals what we (or, as it is, the U.S. government) know, and by revealing what we know it also endangers those who supply us with information about our adversaries. When such information becomes public, the source of that information can be in grave danger (or, as Jack Nicholson said “is there any other kind?”) and, in some cases, be executed almost immediately. What Jack Teixeira apparently doesn’t understand is that revealing information puts our sources at risk. Certain information can come from very limited sources, and when that information in U.S. hands becomes public, those who had access to said information and revealed it to the U.S. are in questioned and, in many cases, executed or imprisoned for a very long time.

Some liars make themselves famous for the wrong reasons, and all of the exposed liars make 2022 an annus mirabilis. Sunny Balwani is getting thirteen years in federal prison for misleading investors out of millions of dollars. Elizabeth Holmes who partnered with Balwani, was sentenced to eleven years for claiming her biotech firm Theranos could do things it, in fact, could not do. Sam Bankman-Fried faces a potential one-hundred fifteen year sentence in the federal slammer if he is convicted in federal court of bilking crypto investors out of billions of dollars. According to one of my law professors, going up against the Feds is almost always a losing proposition.

Not a lawyer, but took a few law classes; the professors taught the law classes as if they were teaching in law school. The constitutional law professor (Harvard grad, by the way) stated that there were aspects of the law that our Supreme Court deliberately stayed away from, because they were “slippery slope” issues. Welcome to the slippery slope, America.

The recent decision, which will probably be known as Dobb v. Jackson, turned to federalism. “Turned to federalism” means the issue has been turned back to the states to decide for themselves. The federal protection of abortion is no more. The SCOTUS decided that the federal protection of the right to get an abortion was not constitutional, that is to say, there is nothing in our Constitution that guarantees the right to get an abortion; Roe v. Wade is overturned.