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Former Congressman David Stockman also headed Reagan's Office of Management and Budget. Not of the Reagan White House Office, but the Office of the entire United States. Here's what he said about the failed budget negotiations:
"Fiscal governance in Washington is totally kaput. They never pass an annual budget resolution and enforcement plan, which was taken as a sacred duty back in the day; and there are never even annual appropriations bills for the mere 25% of the budget still subject to the Congressional “power of the purse”.
Instead, what occurs is a perennial string of short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) followed by an 11th hour, 3000 page pork-ridden “Omnibus Appropriations” bill that no one has read and which gives log-rolling (i.e. more domestic for more defense) a new definition.
In short, the debt ceiling was the only fiscal control mechanism left. And even that has been neutered time after time in the last decade by the hideous, flat-out lie that if the Treasury on any given day is one dollar short of being able to cover all of its due bills it must default on each and every one of them including interest payments, thereby destroying the credit of the United States. Yada, yada.
Finally, that lie was being put to the test and would have been eviscerated sometime next week. Yet after a lifetime on the public teat, Kevin McCarthy like his two GOP predecessors surrendered to the Doomsday Machine because he works for the GOP wing of the Swamp, not the voters, current and future.
And he did so while expectorating the most risible of lies: Republicans are changing the culture and trajectory of Washington—and we’re just getting started.
Not close. Not in the ballpark or even the catcher’s box behind home plate.
The deal does absolutely nothing to change the current “trajectory” toward fiscal disaster because it reduces nary a dime of built-in spending for defense, entitlements/mandatories, veterans and net interest, while those items account for 89% of the $80 trillion of built-in spending over the next decade."
Here's a list compiled by Open Source Defense:
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Repeal Bush 41’s assault weapon import ban
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Redefine “armor-piercing ammo” to re-allow banned ammo types
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Redefine 922(r) out of existence
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Bring back kitchen table FFLs, and make a new internet-sales FFL (this is in the 2017 ATF white paper)
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Repeal the photos and fingerprints parts of ATF Rule 41F (an Obama-era rule change), so that trusts don’t need photos and fingerprints for their members. (Careful here: Rule 41F also changed “you need CLEO approval” to “you just need to notify your CLEO, but they can’t stop you” — that was a very important positive change to keep.)
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Expansive allowance for pistol braces. Make it official that anything goes.
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Grant a blanket lawful purposes exemption for gun possession to people in the country on nonimmigrant visas (tourists, students, etc.)
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Machine gun amnesty
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Presumptive approvals for Form 1s and Form 4s. They approve it instantly, and then can claw it back ...
“It is impossible to maintain an integrated multivalent society once neighbors start kidnapping each other's children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other's cultural events, slaying each other's teachers and religious leaders and tearing down their icons. Crucially, it is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West, and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years.”
David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London.
Dr. Betz does not mention crimes of rape, perhaps because in France it is so enormously underreported. Only ~6% of victims report to authorities, because of fear of being blamed and charged with Islamophobia or other “hate crime.” Based on these few reported accusations, rape by migrants in France exceeds 10,000 cases in the last five years. Multiply that by the 94% non-reported cases. Sometimes there are witnesses. In ...
The theologian Robert Dabney, in writing against public education, claimed that the half-educated man is worse than the man without any education, for the latter at least knows his ignorance and will look to his betters humbly for guidance, whereas the former thinks he’s educated and proceeds without caution into abject foolishness.
Fast, dumb AI catering to the impatient risks creating a society of not half-educated but entirely pseudo-educated people whose self-appraisal of what they know will reach historic lows proportional to what they actually know.
--Tom Owens
