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In a debate among four California senatorial candidates, three of whom are Democrats, Republican senatorial candidate and former MLB All-Star Steve Garvey hammered Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), accusing him of lying to all Americans.
The debate included Garvey, Schiff, and California Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee.
“I think you’ve been censured for lying,” Garvey stated bluntly to Schiff.
After an interlude, Schiff replied by attacking former President Donald Trump, saying:
I was just called a liar by Mr. Garvey. Mr. Garvey, I was censured for standing up to a corrupt president. And you know something? I would do it all over again. Because that corrupt president, that president has been indicted with 91 felony counts, that president that you won’t refuse to support. Yeah, he’s a danger, and I will stand up to him and (former House Speaker) Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and any of those MAGA enablers of his in the Congress. The reason why our democracy is in trouble is because folks don’t have the courage to stand up when they need to.
“Sir, you lied to 300 million people and you can’t take that back,” Garvey fired back.
The resolution that was passed in June 2023 censuring Schiff — the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee — started by declaring that “the allegation that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presidential election has been revealed as false by numerous in-depth investigations,” then followed by stating Schiff had abused the trust that had been given to him by allowing him access to “sensitive intelligence unavailable to most Members of Congress.”
“Representative Schiff abused this trust by alleging he had evidence of collusion that, as is clear from reports by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and Special Counsel Durham, never existed,” the resolution continued, adding, “… for years, Representative Schiff has spread false accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia” and had “ behaved dishonestly and dishonorably on many other occasions, including by publicly, falsely denying that his staff communicated with a whistleblower to launch the first impeachment of President Trump.”
“Representative Schiff hindered the ability of the Intelligence Committee to fulfill its oversight responsibilities over the Intelligence Community, an indispensable pillar of our national security” and had “misled the American people and brought disrepute upon the House of Representatives,” the resolution asserted.
The results of an investigation into voter fraud in Illinois are not only high but truly disturbing and the following thoughts came rushing through me after seeing them. Let’s face it election fraud in IL./ Chicago has been going on for a very long time. I, like most of us raised in the city, back in the day always thought that political pull was a good thing, it was a way to get your foot in the door. We accepted it we were for the idea that we/Chicago controlled everything and outsiders could go f….. themselves if they didn’t like it, this is our city. We didn’t mind because Blue-collar families depended on strong blue-collar politicians to stand up for them and that’s why these politicians “almost always Democrat” got our votes and our Union support. So what happened? When did this change?
When did these blue-collar politicians start to protect/vote in favor of sending our Union Jobs overseas, turning their backs on the Blue-collar worker and their Unions? And why are our Unions still supporting these politicians? When did these politicians and their voters become so anti-God and in favor of exposing our children to this nonsense in the school system?
Explicit materials like 3rd graders being taught how to masturbate, books teaching 5th graders how to give oral sex, or teaching little kids they can choose sex-altering surgeries!??? What happened to the mostly Catholic/Christian Union members who wouldn’t stand for it? Why aren’t they standing up by the thousands shaking their fist saying “NOT ON OUR WATCH!” Where did these people who believed in God and Country go? Or did they simply die off and we the supposed carriers of the torch just gave up and decided to fall in line and take the BS? Maybe we just thought that it’s in GOD’s hands and we can’t change anything.
Well friends that’s like leaning on a shovel and praying for a hole. If you had told me 27 years ago that in the future I was going to be not only voting Republican but also representing the Republican Party and getting involved in politics, I would have said “Get the F….. OUTA HERE!” To me this isn’t political, I know it seems like it is but it is not. We/our country is at a crossroads. It’s not a battle between Republican vs Democrat, white vs black, straight vs gay, vaccinated vs non-vaccinated or any other kind of divisive title or group society wants to pigeonhole a person into. What we are experiencing is simply Good vs Evil. Now we can continue to lean on our shovels and pray for that hole or we can start digging. Spread the word, and start in your own homes with your kids, if you haven’t already. Try having peaceful awakening conversations with family, friends, and neighbors that reflect commonsensical ideas. And most important get right with God, and if you need to reacquaint yourself He’s in the same place that you left Him waiting for your return.
“[A]dd to your faith virtue, and to your virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity.” 2 Peter 5:7 King James Version
Since faith is one of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), “adding” virtue must mean virtue of a certain type, or virtue in sync with reason and experience. Both reason and experience tell us that tempting human nature can be very dangerous. And yet this is exactly the political policy of the current executive branch of the federal government – a stress test on brotherly kindness – a stress test on loving one’s neighbor as oneself. The political gamble is that human “deficient inclinations”, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines them, will prevail over patience and charity resulting in a cultural meltdown into chaos, violence, and baseness. Human nature, in other words, at its worst.
Miss Constitution thinks this is no accident. Having made the decision to end the nation-state of the United States of America by allowing an international invasion, the guess is that the normally rule-conscious and big-hearted American citizen will eventually break down into indiscriminate loathing that will then be labeled “racist” and “un-Christian” – the opposite of St. Peter’s admonition above. If deliberate, this is a clever and wicked plan. It is a plan only the clever and wicked could devise.
Add to your virtue, knowledge. . .
Our society is in the current fad of seeing all through the prism of race. Thousands of years ago Asians crossed a now non-existent land mass to come to North America and divided into distinct tribes. Some writers like to call these tribes First Peoples. One might call them aboriginal, like the forests some of them inhabited. With the invention of the compass, explorers began to take dangerous journeys by sea, and these tribes were discovered. The French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Swedes, the Danish, the British, and others were some of the first to emigrate from Europe to the west. Sometimes they were welcomed, sometimes they were not. Some of the peoples already here were “virtuous”, some were not. Some who emigrated here were “virtuous”, some were not.
And yet, the issue of immigration emphasizes the group, not the individual, and this distorts the discussion. American law on immigration has always been reactive of the times and that is why when one looks at the history of that law there are no real anchors or principles that undergird the statutes or the enforcement of those statutes. Other aspects of America’s Rule of Law are anchored in the timeless, in individual unalienable rights, in the existence of the soul, in man’s quest for liberty, in duty to God, country, and neighbor, in the very definition of citizen and republic.
Immigration, on the other hand, based on nationalities, religions, and races not persons, sways in the political wind of the “now.” When the British failed to re-conquer America in the War of 1812, Irish Catholics and Lutheran Germans came to America in droves. Catholicism in a Protestant country was seen by many as abhorrent. With the rise of industrialism after the Civil War, labor unions saw Chinese immigration as a threat to wages and the Chinese were excluded. Woodrow Wilson wanted to convince the nation that all Germans are blood-thirsty rapists so he could justify entering WWI.
And on and on it goes – immigration as a reaction to current events. The rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s created the perfect environment for national self-loathing and a change in immigration policy. From the concept that those who emigrate to America must learn our system and assimilate into a giant melting pot of stability to the concept of punishing “whiteness” by systematically eliminating the white majority was established by Congress in 1965 and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. Chain migration (anchoring one family member so all are allowed to come) and virtually eliminating British and other founding nationalities, sealed the deal. The white American majority will be gone by mid-century. Senator Ted Kennedy proclaimed the dramatic change “will not upset the ethnic mix in our society. It will not relax the standards of admission.” Really? The United Nations and other globalist organizations are piling on relentlessly with notions of the elimination of nation-states and free international immigration.
And to knowledge, patience and brotherly kindness. . .
What had been the practice of emphasizing the group as a reaction to the political winds of the day, but screening the individual in that group, has been deliberately abandoned. Instead of the individually virtuous from many ethnic groups, it is assumed that race itself is a marker of the good. Nothing could be further from the truth. No notion could be more damaging to any society. And so, America is experiencing a stress test in brotherly kindness. Groups have invaded without screening individuals in these groups and Americans are asked to be patient and to be kind – a tempting of human nature.
And to brotherly kindness, charity. . .
How, then, are Americans to react to this obvious dismantling of our society? The US Constitution specifically prohibits, in Article IV, section 4, this current national policy of open borders. The Constitution, unfortunately, is not in play. What is in play is the individual American citizen. Tempted or not, impatient or not, temperate or not, it is not antithetical to St. Peter’s reminder for the individual American to feel righteous anger. Righteous anger translated into a demand for personal scrutiny of every person who has bypassed examination and entered the United States illegally. This anger is not tied to race, it is tied to reason, experience, and necessity.
It is in this midst of faulty ideology, of gross incompetence, of clever and wicked plans, of the abandonment of ancient and trusted principles, that the individual response must remain firm but humane. It is how the inappropriate are removed that is the measure of brotherly love. Of whatever race wanting to emigrate to America, whether tired or poor, whether yearning to be free, the American people have a right to ask that each person be virtuous.
Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing. 1 Peter 3:9
In a Constitutional Republic we repay evil and wickedness through free and fair elections. For those elections to have meaning, a virtuous people must have knowledge. Miss Constitution, again, calls for vigorous Civics Education, K-12, philosophy, authentic American history, Western Civilization, theology, the ancient languages, and ethics. Knowledge is the shield against the worst in human nature, charity the goal – in the firm hope that America may again obtain God’s blessing.
Federal officials instructed banks to comb through customer data if terms like “TRUMP” or “MAGA” were used in transactions, according to documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The revelations were made as House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) announced he had requested an interview with Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations Division of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
“We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP,’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,” Jordan said. “What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.”
FinCEN reportedly asked banks to help federal law enforcement identify transactions of persons of interest using specific typologies and Merchant Category Codes after January 6, 2021. FinCEN provided the banks with documentation on various typologies and suggested search terms, according to Jordan.
“These materials included a document recommending the use of generic terms like ‘TRUMP’ and ‘MAGA’ to ‘search Zelle payment messages’ as well as a ‘prior FinCEN analysis’ of ‘Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators,’” Jordan wrote.
“According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.’ In other words, FinCEN urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression,” Jordan added.
The letter also said that other transaction keywords identified by the feds included “Cabela’s” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
“Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus — and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights — FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors. This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties,” Jordan wrote.
The letter asks Bishoff to be prepared to speak to lawmakers about what safeguards FinCEN has in place to safeguard constitutional liberties, the government’s use of private financial information, and coordination between FinCEN and the private sector.
Jordan also sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray to request an interview with FBI official Peter Sullivan over testimony that the FBI had requested information from Bank of America on “ANY historical purchase” of a gun six months before January 6, 2021, of anyone who had been in Washington, D.C., around January 6.
(The Center Square) – Starting in the fall of 2024, a new state law, the Wellness Checks in Schools Program Act, will require yearly mental health screenings for Illinois’ 2 million school students.
Mark Klaisner, executive director of West 40 in West Cook County, said schools only have a few months to find a screening model and train people to administer the screenings. The Illinois State Board of Education is currently working through the challenge of exactly how to get a mental health screening process up and running.
The goal is to identify troubled children and intervene before their mental health problems escalate. On Jan. 3 in Perry, Iowa, a small rural school district, a 17-year-old who had been bullied for years shot seven people, including the principal, before killing an 11-year-old boy and himself.
“In 1999, we were all shocked by Columbine. How could that happen? Now it happens every week,” Klaisner said.
The problem is more widespread than the cases that get on the news, Klaisner said.
“If you were to walk into any school and talk to the principal or the dean, they will tell you that behavioral incidents are way up from what they were 3 to 5 years ago,” Klaisner said. “It’s fights in the hallways. It’s kids acting out.”
Safe schools, designated schools where Illinois children are assigned after multiple suspensions and expulsion, are “busting at the seams,” Klaisner said.
“Way before COVID, we saw the increase of instances of disturbed kids acting out at school,” Klaisner said.
The COVID school shutdowns have made the problem worse, he said.
“The rise of behavioral and mental health issues coming out of the pandemic has been astounding,” he said
For years, experts at the Lurie Children’s Hospital, the Center for Childhood Resilience, and the Chapin Hall Center at the University of Chicago have consulted with Illinois on the best ways to care for students with mental health problems.
Ideally, a screening session will be a 15-minute, one-on-one conversation between a trained social worker or counselor and a student. Trained screeners have more success in finding problems when they can look for body language and cues, Klaisner said.
Anxiety and depression are triggers for behavioral problems. Screeners may find a child who is concerned about coming to school. The child may think that othert students are looking at him or talking about him, indicating a higher-than-normal level of anxiety.
“Let’s follow up with that young person and see what is going on with them,” Klaisner said.
A decade ago, social workers in schools only dealt with kids who had disabilities, he said. Now schools are finding that many families are dealing with difficult, trauma-based issues that manifest in schools.
“You will find educators who are feeling the pressure of ‘one more thing on our plate.’” Klaisner said. “It is already on our plate and we can’t deny its existence.”
Dry January savings: Illinois wine taxes 4x higher than New York, California
Illinois’ excise tax on wine is more than 4 times higher than the same bottle in New York or California. Buying in Chicago adds extra tax layers, hitting 6 times the taxes of other big cities.
Illinoisans looking to save calories by abstaining from alcohol during “dry January” will also save some cash by foregoing a glass of wine at home.
Illinois taxes wine at $1.39 per gallon. At the local level, Cook County adds another $0.24 per gallon if it’s up to 14% alcohol by volume and Chicago adds another $0.36.
The other two biggest metropolitan areas in the country, New York City and Los Angeles, both tax wine at a fraction of Illinois rates: $0.30 for NYC and $0.20 per gallon for LA. California is tied with Texas for the lowest per-gallon rate in the country.
States with similar populations tend to have similar tax patterns. For example, Illinois, California and New York are within one-tenth of a percent when it comes to combined state and local sales taxes. But California and New York aren’t as harsh to wine drinkers’ wallets, nor are their biggest cities.
Illinois’ tax revenue from wine hasn’t even kept up with inflation. From fiscal years 2014 to 2023, state wine tax revenue grew a meager $10 million.
Springfield lawmakers should look to real pension reform instead of regressive sin taxes to fix the state’s financial problems. Illinoisans should be left to fix their bad habits at their own discretion.
WHY THE SECRET TO NATIONAL PROSPERITY MAY RUN DEEPER THAN ECONOMICS
January 2024
2 1/2 miles. It’s not very long.
Only slightly longer than the National Mall in Washington.i Not even 2/3 of the length of the Las Vegas Strip.ii
But also … it can be the distance between two different worlds. In fact, 2 1/2 miles is the distance between Australia and Papua New Guinea at their nearest point, in the Torres Strait.iii
In Papua New Guinea, the national wealth averages out to about $3,500 per person per year. In Australia, it averages out to around $65,000 per person per year.iv Two-and-a-half miles apart … and nearly 20 times wealthier.
How does this kind of thing happen? Actually, we know the answer.
Because it turns out that the secret to how nations get wealthy … isn’t really a secret at all.
The world has never been as wealthy as it is right now.v That’s the good news.
The bad news? That prosperity is far from universal.
In fact, even though the world’s poverty rate has been steadily declining for some time, vi it’s still the case that 6.7 billion people around the world live on $30 a day or less.vii
How did this happen? How do some countries become fantastically wealthy while others remain trapped in poverty?
In 2022, scholars at the Atlantic Council divided all the countries in the world into four categories: really prosperous, mostly prosperous, mostly unprosperous, and really unprosperous.viii
There are two things to note about this analysis. First, some of the categories may not line up with your expectations. A country like China, for example, may have a huge economy overall, but in terms of income per person it ranks behind countries like Libya or Serbia.ix
Second, if you’re trying to find a pattern on this map … good luck.
Are certain regions of the world just uniquely blessed — or cursed?
If so, you’d be hard pressed to explain why Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are doing so much better than the rest of Asia.
Or why Venezuela or Guyana are doing so much worse than the rest of South America.
Or why Israel stands out in the Middle East.
Is it all a matter of who has the most natural resources?
Venezuela’s poverty comes despite the fact that it has the world’s largest reserves of oil. x
Africa has 40 percent of the world’s gold, 90 percent of its platinum, and the largest supply of diamonds on the planet.xi And yet not a single country on the continent is classified as even moderately prosperous.
Meanwhile, Belgium is one of the 20 richest countries on the planet and, best we can tell, their biggest natural resource is The Smurfs.
But if there’s no answer to be found on this map, there might be one to be found on this one:xii
Now, we know what you’re thinking: It’s the same map. But here’s what’s interesting: It’s not.
This is a map of the countries of the world ranked not by how wealthy they are, but by how free they are — which turns out to be the key to whether or not they become wealthy.
The Atlantic Council’s analysis found that every single country classified as “free” … was also classified as prosperous — and virtually all of the unfree ones weren’t.xiii And it’s not just a modest difference, by the way.
Citizens of the “free” countries were six times wealthier than those in the “mostly unfree” countries. In fact, they were even five times wealthier than those in the “mostly free” countries.
And here’s the thing: This isn’t just a matter of a handful of the ultra-wealthy skewing the numbers. Another study on the same subject found that the poorest people in free countries were more than twice as wealthy as the average person in unfree countries.xiv
It almost seems too simple to be the answer. But the track record here is pretty clear: People have a natural incentive to make money. They want to do well. They want to take care of themselves and their families. And as long as a nation gives them the basic tools to do that — the right to freely do business with others, the right to control their own property, the right to have their day in court if someone tries to cheat them — the whole country is going to prosper in the process.
For proof of this, we only need to look at how the same groups of people perform when they’re given economic freedom versus when they’re not.
During the Cold War, the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were controlled by the Soviet Union. This is what their national wealth looked like at the time.xv After the brief, rocky period when they gained their independence, they started implementing economic freedom … and their national wealth began to look like this:
Another Cold War example comes from Germany. In communist-controlled East Germany, national wealth looked like this. While in free West Germany, it looked like this:xvi
Communist China versus a free Taiwan looks like this:xvii
And while a totalitarian North Korea looks like this, a free South Korea looks like this:xviii
Sorry, fellas, but this line isn’t gonna get you K-pop.
It’s easy to get depressed by global inequality. How can so many people live in such grinding poverty while the rest of us live lives that seem so comfortable by comparison? But what this research tells us is there’s also cause for optimism here. Because no nation is doomed to be poor.
When people are allowed to prosper … they will. Romania was once a country known almost exclusively for its poverty. But between 1950 and 2016, it became 20 times wealthier.xix In that same time period, Singapore — a country that’s smaller than New York City and has virtually no natural resources — became nearly 30 times wealthier.xx And those people did it … simply because they were allowed to.
All of which means that the future of the world’s poorest countries … will be as bright as their governments allow them to be. So, let’s hope they choose wisely.
I mean, c’mon, it’d be embarrassing to be outperformed by The Smurfs people.
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