Muda69

Perhaps they thought they had no real representation in Washington, a sentiment I can completely see.

Much like the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party betrayed the British monarchy?

The Left’s Reichstag Fire https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/left-reichstag-fire-soft-totalitarianism-social-credit-system-live-not-by-lies/ When Black Lives Matter protests turned into mass riots, where were the calls to suppress CNN, The New York Times, and other media that constantly repeated the BLM message, and the general message that America is a bastion of white supremacy, whose regime lacks legitimacy? They didn’t exist. They didn’t exist because this is a free country. I read the Times every day, and on some issues, it’s more or less a propaganda sheet (its Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project is clearly intended to delegitimize the American founding). But the state and any other authority had better keep its hands off the Times, and all other left-wing media. The idea that a journalist, Oliver D’Arcy, is calling for a discussion on whether to deplatform and suppress other journalists — including a direct competitor — is chilling. But I am certain that it is a sign of things to come. Yesterday Simon & Schuster cancelled a deal with Sen. Josh Hawley, who was under contract to pen a book about the tyranny of Big Tech. I was bothered by this, because I don’t like to see anybody lose a book deal, and because I think Big Tech deserves a hell of a lot of scrutiny by Congress. But then Hawley issued a statement calling it “Orwellian” and a violation of the First Amendment, and I decided not to participate in defending Hawley’s book deal. It is not “Orwellian” or a violation of the First Amendment. All publishers retain the right in their contracts with authors to cancel books pre-publication (trust me on this; I’ve written five books). Whether or not it is morally correct for a publisher to do so is a different question. I stood up for Woody Allen in his fight with his publisher last year over this issue. Hawley is free to shop his manuscript around, and any other publisher is free to buy it and publish it. To call this “Orwellian” and unconstitutional is cynical, manipulative hype. While I wish S&S had stuck by its commitment to publish what I expect will be an important book, the fact is that Josh Hawley, by his own actions post-Election Day, has made himself a uniquely controversial figure, one central to one of the most shameful events in American political history. What Simon & Schuster did was regrettable, from my point of view, but within the bounds of reason. I bring this up to say that not every attempt to marginalize a dissident-right voice is unjustified. Take too the case of Paul Davis, a Texas corporate lawyer who Instagrammed a photo of himself on Capitol Hill, at the riot: His company fired him. I can’t blame them. He is a lawyer, and he participated in a riot. To be fair, if he did not enter into the Capitol, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. But the fact that he was tear-gassed means he was at least very close to the action. The event itself was a shameful act, and I can’t blame a company for wanting to separate itself from one of its house lawyers, especially one stupid enough to put evidence of his participation in it on social media. That said, will it stop with Paul Davis? I doubt it. I expect many companies to pink-slip employees who were photographed at the Trump event, even if they were nowhere near the invasion of the Capitol. If it happens, it will be extremely unjust, and dangerous. If photographic or other hard evidence existed of an employee participating in one of last year’s race riots existed, a company would be justified in firing that employee. But not everybody who marched in those protests intended to riot, or be at all tied to criminal activity. There would be no grounds to fire them. Nevertheless, I expect corporate America, goosed by left-wing activists, to undertake a purge of any employees who publicly expressed sympathy, on their private social media channels or anywhere, with Trump, MAGA, or the election protest. This has already been happening in some hospitals over gender ideology. As I write in Live Not By Lies: Do not think that your many years of service or your expertise will save you if your company or institution’s HR department finds evidence that you are now or ever were a sympathizer with MAGA. We are about to enter into a full-blown political and moral panic, led by the institutional power-holders. Glenn Greenwald is a man of the Left, but yesterday spoke out courageously against the coming repression. Excerpt: I hope we listen to Greenwald, but I doubt we will. The disgusting assault on the US Capitol, and on the constitutional process of certifying an election, by Trump fanatics was a great gift to the authoritarian, repressive Left. After last year’s riots, the Establishment accelerated the implementation of race-radicalism as re-education within US schools, universities, and other institutions. And now, that same Establishment can be expected to accelerate even stronger ideological measures to suppress anything it regards as dissent — and that will eventually mean the expression of ordinary social, religious, and political conservatism, even by people who never liked Donald Trump. This is what it means to live in a pre-totalitarian society. But turning to the Right, you know what it also means to live in a pre-totalitarian society? Read Declan Leary’s TAC account of being at the MAGA rally on Capitol Hill when it went off on Wednesday. Excerpts: More: Read it all. Leary says that He’s no doubt correct. I’ve been looking at the social and other media of some of the people involved in the fanatical Jericho March, and there is not the least contrition or second thoughts about what they have done. To take an especially sad case (for me, personally), here is a piece I did about the hysterical post-election rhetoric from Eric Metaxas. Excerpts: More from that December post of mine: You can hear and see Eric say all these things in this Charlie Kirk interview from December 9. Well, now five people are dead, including Trump fanatic Ashli Babbitt, who was as rabid about Trump as Eric Metaxas was. Here’s a link to a New York Post story about Babbitt, including a barking-mad video she posted about Kamala Harris. You should watch it, and consider whether you want this country to be ruled by people like that. I went back to read her Twitter feed from early December until now. It’s full of QAnon garbage, such as: And so forth. Lots of this stuff. And, of course, this: The Washington Post has published video from one of the protesters, showing the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. You really should watch this. She was at the forefront of an angry mob that had reached the doors of the Speakers Lobby, which, had they gotten in, would have given them access to the House Chamber. The WaPo has this map: That’s how close the mob was to the Chamber. At the start of the video, you can see, behind the closed doors, members of Congress. Police are trying to keep the mob from going through the doors, but the mob chants, “F–k the blue! F–k the blue!”, and starts bashing the glass on the doors. Eventually the police move away, and the crowd keeps bashing. The doors begin to give way. An officer inside the door points a gun at the mob. Someone yells that he has a gun. The mob does nothing. Then the police officer fires. A bullet hits Ashli Babbitt, who later died. The only person responsible for Ashli Babbitt’s death is Ashli Babbitt. The officer who shot her was doing his duty. But there is on MAGA media talk about how she is a martyr, and was assassinated by the Deep State, etc. Such rot. See, though, Eric Metaxas spoke openly about how “we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” And now this lunatic woman, hopped up on this kind of rhetoric, died assaulting the US House of Representatives. For what? This is how her life ended. She alone is responsible for her death, but I wish that people like Eric, who juiced up their listeners with talk about the necessity to shed blood to defend Donald Trump, would feel even the slightest bit of remorse for their rash rhetoric. Not gonna happen. Not yet, anyway. He’s doubling down on the MAGA-mob mentality: He is not the only one. As I said, this is painful to me, because Eric is a longtime friend. He has given over his fine mind and sweet spirit to madness — madness that has now resulted in the same bloodshed that he was telling his listeners they needed to be prepared to submit to as recently as last month. Notice, though, in this tweet of his from Thursday, he is already deflecting blame for the event onto Antifa. This is all over MAGA social media, this idea. Nope, couldn’t be them. All this bad stuff was surely Antifa. Friends and readers report hearing this from their own social networks, and family members. Listen, if you have been a regular reader of this blog for a while, you know that I have been hell on the ideological Left for pushing its fanatical theories. My book Live Not By Lies goes into detail about how the identity-politics Left is laying the groundwork for a form of totalitarianism. That has not changed one bit as the result of events this week — in fact, as I claim in this post, these events have almost certainly accelerated the Left’s plans. But no honest person can deny that Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees have also accelerated it by their actions. And they too are going along the totalitarian path. In Live Not By Lies, I have a chapter on Hannah Arendt and her study of how Nazi and Communist totalitarianism came to power. A sign that totalitarianism is at hand is the willingness of large numbers of people to quit caring about the truth, and to prefer ideology. Excerpt: Add “for Donald Trump” and “for ‘Make America Great Again'” to Kovaly’s list. This is not a left-vs-right thing. This is about the power of ideological narrative to conquer hearts and minds — and nations. Ashli Babbitt’s road to her own violent death began when she opened her mind up to the lies of QAnon and Donald Trump. As you watch that video on the Post’s site — the one of the events leading up to Babbitt’s shooting — think of this passage from Live Not By Lies: Or maybe because they saw in these mobs a wave that they could surf to political power. This, I think, explains Sen. Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz. You read Declan Leary’s account of embedding himself in that MAGA mob on Wednesday, and you will see examples of baseness masquerading as liberation. This has long been a facet of the Left. It is now undeniably a facet of the Right. I have long complained in this space that responsible liberals have allowed totalitarians to thrive on the Left because they lack the courage, the wisdom, or the conviction to stand up to them. It is now undeniably true on the Right as well. The difference is this: Trump and his fanatics have been unmasked. We know where their brand of ideological madness leads: to a mob attacking the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated certification of an election. The Establishment will now use everything in its power to suppress anything related to Trumpism — including plain old conservatism. Because the left-wing extremists have honeycombed Establishment institutions with their sympathizers, the Left will now benefit from popular disgust with Trump’s legacy, and use this moment to consolidate power. The social credit system is coming. Repression is coming. Guilt by association is coming. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I feel sure that any real opportunity the Right had to stop it was trampled underfoot by Donald Trump and his mob, who were willing to throw everything away to live by the lies of QAnon, Stop The Steal, and late-period MAGA. We on the Right who were not part of this movement are going to have to pay a steep price for what they have done. Don’t misread me: we have to fight it as hard as we can, and hope we can prevail. To my Christian readers, I say again: read the signs of the times. We are in a Kolakovic Moment. Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Croatian priest to whom I dedicate Live Not By Lies, escaped the Nazis and hid out in Slovakia, in 1943. He immediately set himself to preparing the Slovak church for the persecution he knew was coming. From my book: Father Kolakovic’s bishops denounced him as an alarmist, but he did not listen. He understood what was happening, and what was going to happen. He taught the Christians who were willing to listen not to be passive, to assume that it couldn’t happen there. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the might of the Red Army. He taught them how to use their freedom to prepare for what was coming. This is what we have to do right now: use our freedom to prepare to resist. Do not listen to the lies of the MAGA diehards, whose fanaticism has been a blessing to the would-be totalitarians of the Left. Do not allow yourself to think that you will be protected because you never supported Trump, Stop The Steal, or any of it. The attack on the Capitol — which was unquestionably a MAGA affair — is the Left’s Reichstag fire: a pretext to begin the systematic oppression of all opposition. If you thought the Left’s soft-totalitarian rhetoric of smashing rights and liberties for the sake of creating a “safe space” was bad before, oh baby, just you wait. UPDATE: Since posting this, I learned that Twitter has permanently banned Donald Trump. I feel exactly as Denny Burk does. Trump deserves it — but this will not stop with Trump. Don’t you believe for a second that it will. UPDATE.2: More: Let me repeat, in case I was not clear enough: resisters and dissidents against the coming soft totalitarianism cannot afford to waste themselves listening to QAnon and MAGA lies. This is real, and this is serious. We need to think as clearly as we can. UPDATE.3: This is true: UPDATE.4: Five minutes ago, I thought that the problem is not really going to be Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, but the faceless people in corporations and institutions. Then I read this new in the WSJ: More: Well, here we go. Do we not have laws now capable of dealing with the thugs who invaded the Capitol? Do we need more laws? Of course we don’t — but we are going to get them, because we have to made America a Safe Space™. UPDATE.5: A Catholic reader e-mails: UPDATE.6: This really is astonishing footage. It is infuriating, what that MAGA mob did to this country. I hope every one of these people who can be positively identified are arrested and charged. They are no patriots. UPDATE.7: Columnist Debra J. Saunders is correct, I’m sorry to say: UPDATE.8: This is important. This was always coming — we just didn’t know what would kick it off. UPDATE.9: A reader just sent in a screenshot of a young woman outing the names of her mother, uncle, and other family members on social media, as Trump supporters. She claims that she is a lesbian, and that her family kicked her out for going to BLM marches. I’m not going to post the photo, but of course Twitter is thrilled that she’s turned her family over to the mob. I’m not going to add to the outing by posting the screenshot (my reader did not ask me to, note well). The reader writes: UPDATE.10: Reader Barlaam of Weimerica writes:

Your Rioters Are Worse Than Our Rioters https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/your-rioters-are-worse-than-our-rioters/

So, is the last time we will see Mr. Rivers and Mr. Roethlisberger on a football field?

The Bears’ offense should be ashamed for torturing the kids watching on Nickelodeon: https://deadspin.com/the-bears-offense-should-be-ashamed-for-torturing-the-1846033306 Watson in a Bears uniform and Bieneimy on the sideline. Intriguing.................

I don't follow Canadian politics at all so no, I don't notice.

I would put Indiana in the lower half of that list of state, most definitely. And Illinois does have the best high school football field in the nation, Fleur-de-lis field in Greenfield:

What Should Happen to the Capitol Invaders? https://reason.com/2021/01/08/what-should-happen-to-the-capitol-invaders/ He's referring to the rule of felony murder, a legal doctrine that allows prosecutors to charge a person with murder if somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even if the offender played no role in the person's death and did not intend for anybody to die. The felony murder rule is terrible. It's not justice. It should be eliminated. We should not be convicting people of murder when they did not, in fact, commit murder. I bring up Lieu's tweet here because California, the state he represents, mostly eliminated its own version of the felony murder rule in 2018 (though it is worth noting that killing a police officer remains its most significant exception, and so it would still apply here if this all took place in California). There are many, many penalties we can throw at these people, and federal prosecutors habitually charge defendants with any possible violation they can unearth in order to intimidate them into plea bargains. The only people we should consider charging with murder are those who are actually responsible for Sicknick's injuries. We have enough laws to address this invasion and don't need more. There have been dozens of arrests related to the assault on the Capitol. Everything any of these people did that harmed a person or property at the Capitol is a violation of an existing law. It feels important to point this out because, in the wake of any outrage-inducing criminal event, politicians will quickly come forth to try to take advantage of the situation to introduce laws to make the government more powerful and increase the punishment and incarceration of citizens. President-elect Joe Biden says he is open to passing more laws to address domestic terrorism, possibly including "red flag laws" that allow the government to forbid citizens from possessing guns even if they haven't been convicted of crimes out of fear of what they might do. If Trump's presidency has taught us anything at all, it should be that the federal government is extremely powerful. What happened on Wednesday is a result of poor planning and police control, not a result of the government not being powerful enough to stop it. Fox News pointed out that these trespassers could face long federal prison sentences thanks to Trump's call to prosecute anybody damaging federal monuments, an executive order he put in place to go after antifa members. Nobody should face 10 years in federal prison for breaking windows, or stealing a bust, or destroying chairs. That's not a proportionate response. That's anger and disgust channeled through the halls of authority, not justice. It will not create peace. It will create martyrs. It won't prevent future violence—it will foment it. Make sure these people are aware of the mercies extended to them. There is an irony, of course, that many of these same people believe in the same extremely harsh forms of justice that Trump does. They see antifa everywhere. Some cynically attempted to blame the invasion on antifa. They refuse to accept the harshness of the criminal justice system because they aren't typically the targets. Resist the instinct to "teach them a lesson" by making them the targets. But do make sure they know exactly what could have happened. Make sure they know that it's only because of the activism of the very criminal justice reformers they dismiss that they're not being treated the way the federal government treated criminals in the 1990s. In a country that values liberty, what does "justice" look like for the men and women who trespassed in the U.S. Capitol? We should consider what's appropriate on the basis of the reforms some Americans have been pushing for years. Limit pretrial detention to those who may be planning more crimes. America has a pretrial detention problem. We have half a million people who are behind bars who have not yet been convicted of a crime. This is, fortunately, much less common on the federal level, where there are fewer than 50,000 people being detained prior to trial (this isn't counting immigration holds). Pretrial detention is intended to be used when there's no other option to make sure defendants show up for court dates or prevent them from committing other crimes while awaiting trial. But the reality is that our justice system has been throwing people in jail because they couldn't afford bail requirements or because prosecutors exaggerate dangers, and then apply pressure on defendants to accept plea deals so that they hopefully stop languishing in jail. Pretrial detention has turned justice on its head by punishing citizens before they've been convicted. We are also in the midst of a pandemic that has hit jails and prisons hard. We do not need to be filling up jail cells with people who, emotional responses aside, were acting out a deluded fantasy and are likely not an imminent threat. Throughout 2020, Reason covered prisons' mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deaths that followed. Twenty percent of the prison population across the country has been infected with the virus.

The Queen of England? They are both large countries, geographically speaking.

Again, I don't care what Canada does regarding it's voting practices and political parties. Both counties are on the North American continent?

I really don't care about Canada. But since you are a socialist I see why you would be so enamored with our northern neighbors. Canada is a nice place to visit, no way in hell would I want to live there.

No, the answer is elegantly described in the opinion piece. When virtually every presidential election is now the "election of our lifetime" then any rational person would realize that this is because the federal government, especially in the executive branch, have more and more power over the day-to-day lives of everyday citizens. The federal government is just too damn powerful.

Hmm, please define 'idiot' in the context of this forum. What makes one an 'idiot' on the GID? Having a contrary opinion to the masses? Willingness to express that opinion?

The honest criticism of LEO's and those others who have the power to curtail my liberty? That is the reason?

To keep the elites in power while hoodwinking "the people" to believe they actually have a real choice.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/scammers-living-life-on-your-tax-dollars/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

But do we have proof that the statistics cited in that report are no longer valid?

Maybe after I have consumed some caffeine to keep me awake.

I started to, then my eyes glazed over and I stopped.

tl;dr. We all know in the past you have expounded on the virtues of having a de-facto King ruling the United States of America. It appears you still stick by that left wing socialist vision of utopia.

The Capitol Riot Wasn’t a Coup. It Wasn't Even Close. https://mises.org/wire/capitol-riot-wasnt-coup-it-wasnt-even-close There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. Powell and Thyne note this “illegal” qualifier is important to include "because it differentiates coups from political pressure, which is common whenever people have freedom to organize." In other words, protests, or threats of protest don’t count as coups. Neither do legal efforts such as a vote of no confidence or an impeachment. But an even more critical aspect of Powell’s and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites. This can be seen in any stereotypical example of a coup d’etat. This generally involves a renegade military detachment, military officers, and others from within the state apparatus who can employ knowledge, skills, influence, coercive tools gained through membership in the regime’s elite circles. The attempted coup in Japan in 1937, for example, was carried out by more than 1,500 officers and men of the Japanese imperial army. They nonetheless failed, likely because they miscalculated the amount of support they enjoyed among other officers. More recently, in the 2009 Honduran coup, the bulk of the Honduran Army turned on the president Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile. That was a successful coup. More famously, Chile’s 1973 coup was successfully led by Agusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Army, and this enabled him to shell the Chilean executive palace with military hardware. Contrast this with nameless MAGA-hat-wearing flag wavers, and the inappropriateness of the term “coup” in this case should be blatantly obvious. With real coups, power is seized by a faction of the elite which has the ability to take control of the machinery of state indefinitely. Although some of Trump’s critics claim he was somehow responsible for Wednesday’s mob, it is clear that Trump was not coordinating or directing any sort of military operation through Twitter posts. There was no plan for holding power. Had those who invaded the capitol building managed to take control of the building for a time, there’s no reason to think this would somehow translate into control of the state. How would it? The real coercive power remained well ensconced within an apparently undivided military apparatus. Moreover, it has been clear for years that the permanent technocracy which controls the day-to-day execution of federal administrative power (i.e., “the deep state”) has long been committed to undermining the Trump administration—from high ranking FBI agents, to military diplomats, to Pentagon officials. From where would Trump draw the necessary cooperation from elites to overturn more than 200 years of established norms in transfers of presidential power? In any case, the Biden administration is likely to be better for the state's elites than the Trump administration. There is no reason for any group of them to contemplate a coup against Biden. Thus, if any of Wednesday’s capital rioters thought they were about to bring about a coup by smashing some windows in the capitol, they were engaging in thoroughly amateurish thinking. It’s unlikely, however, that more than a few of the rioters thought there was a coup d’etat afoot. It’s more likely most of them simply wanted to dramatically display their displeasure with the federal regime and to signal they weren’t going to placidly submit to whatever the American bureaucracy decided to dish out. Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more common, but with modifiers attached. Examples of these modifiers include “soft,” “constitutional,” “parliamentary,” and “slow-motion.” Numerous critics of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, for example, repeatedly called it a "soft coup." The authors note this is no mere issue of splitting hairs, explaining that “The choice of how to conceptualize a coup is not to be taken lightly since it carries normative, analytical, and political implications.” Increasingly, the term really means “this is a thing I don’t like.” But the term's use paints the non-coup participants as criminals poised to seize power illegally. By applying this term to the acts of a disorganized group of Trump supporters with no base of support among state elites, the pundits know exactly what they’re doing.

https://mises.org/wire/family-fades-governments-subsidize-daycares-and-nursing-homes Whether Idenko was truly as cavalier toward her motherly duties as this quote suggests or needed to return to work out of material necessity is unclear. Thankfully, in this story there is a remnant of the extended family in Idenko’s mother-in-law, who stepped in and gave the child some filial attention. The US follows in the footsteps of its defeated rival. For fiscal year 2020, $5.826 billion was devoted to funding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). The recent CARES Act allocated another $3.5 billion for the CCDBG, which “provides subsidies to assist low-income families in obtaining child care so that parents can work or participate in education or training activities.” Of course, the largest government daycare program is the public K-12 school system. Naturally, the situation is even worse in France, where the state provides 80 percent of the funding for the childcare system, in which “From the age of 2½ months to 3 years a child can be placed in a crèche.” These “crèches” are various types of childcare facilities that are found in “All cities, towns and some villages” and operate eleven hours daily. The Elderly About 1.3 million Americans live in nursing homes rather than with their families. In fiscal year 2010, 66.6 percent of the $207.9 billion of spending on long-term care expenditures came from the government. This includes government spending on nursing homes, as well as funding for other types of long-term care like home health services. However, even when the state uses taxes to hire a healthcare worker to provide assistance within the home, this still helps to replace the family in providing this assistance. In other countries, the state does even more to force resources away from the family and into nursing homes and other forms of state provision for the elderly. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the state uses taxes to fund universal long-term care. The Vampirism of Double Taxation What is so harmful about using taxes to fund these services? Some families who would prefer to take care of their children and elderly parents themselves in their own homes are stripped of the resources they would have used to do so, as these resources are taxed away to pay for daycare and nursing home subsidies, government schools, etc. In effect, those who want to take care of their families are forced to pay twice to do so, first for the subsidies they’re not using and second to take care of their families themselves. When families are taxed but outsourcing family obligations is subsidized, there will be more of the latter, and the family bond will dissolve. What about the Poor? When the state pours resources into an output, it hasn’t summoned these resources ex nihilo. It’s taken these resources from society, and so the employers, family members, and charities that would have ushered the poor into the middle class are all left less able to do so. The state takes from the left pocket of society and gives to the right pocket, minus the share that covers the salaries of the bureaucrats who arrange the transfer and whatever is lost through fraud, corruption, and incompetence. When it comes to efficiently serving the poor, civil society makes the state look like a slow-motion train wreck: The Policy Answer and the Local Answer The decline of the family is caused in part by the state and in part by much deeper issues. Half of the solution is to work to end state subsidies for the replacement and dissolution of the family. The other half is to not wait for this to come about, but rather to fight now in our own lives and take care of those closest to us, despite the obstacles. Agree with Mr. Mkrtchian. These subsidies and policies are slowly destroying the American family, as we can see if now 4-5 generation of some families where the majority of members know nothing more than surviving on public assistance.

By all means please expound on that statement.

https://reason.com/2021/01/07/where-do-we-go-after-the-trumpist-tantrum/ A fantastic piece by Mr. Tuccille. I heartily agree with all this pints. "We the people" have for too long allowed our federal legislators to cede their responsibilities to the office of the POTUS, and now way to much power is invested in that office. As I have argued before the size, scope, and reach of the federal government needs to be reduced by at least 25% across the board. What we are seeing is the result of a federal government where as stated in the opinion piece "Regulation has supplanted legislation, and dear colleague letters, interpretations, and executive orders have supplanted regulation…". This needs to stop.