State Abortion Laws Vary, But the Trend is in Support of Life

By Rob Meyne

  • June 30, 2023
  • 5-min read

Abortion – Part 1

Much has been written about the consequences of the Dobbs decision. As you know, SCOTUS ruled that there was no constitutional right to abortion. It did not make it illegal. It recognizes abortion law is up to each state.

That, of course, is exactly what our founding fathers had in mind. They saw states as essential laboratories for considering and debating public policy. Our founders knew that law may be different from state to state. They were fine with that, even happy about it.

Our legal landscape in the aftermath of Dobbs is inconsistent and confusing from state to state. That is ok. It does not mean Dobbs was a bad decision or that we somehow have a crisis at hand. When we have different policies in different states, it is not a bug in the system; it is a feature of it. That is not in itself a problem.

The effect this ruling has had on some women is explored in an article from Vice, here. It is an interesting read. Even if you don’t agree that the “problems” created by Dobbs should make us question the decision, it is still important to understand how people with opinions different from your own came to their conclusions. That is why we read pieces every day written by people with whom we are likely to disagree.

Remember what the great Hugh Hewitt likes to say. He prefers clarity to agreement. Or as Stephen Covey says, paraphrasing, seek first to understand, then to be understood.

If the Vice piece isn’t persuasive, it is at least interesting, tugs at heartstrings, and shows how a lot of pro-abortion people view the SCOTUS ruling.

No doubt, there are troubling aspects of post-Roe America. It causes, for some people, stress, pain, and heartache, and makes getting an abortion more difficult. Well, as they say… “Duh!” Of course, it does.

States that have passed laws prohibiting or regulating abortion make it harder to get one. That. .. Is… The… Point…

Laws that regulate the purchase of pharmaceuticals, the practice of medicine, carrying firearms, or driving at high speeds are also designed to make those things more difficult.

As is the case with new laws, it isn’t a perfect situation. We often don’t understand all the ramifications of laws until they are implemented. This is a lesson we learned years ago when working in the Indiana House of Representatives. Most of the legislation, in any given session, involves attempts to correct, improve, and revise existing law. Most bills don’t propose new laws. The new state laws on abortion will likely be modified and improved over time. That is a good thing.

Having fewer abortions is a huge improvement in the minds of millions. Whatever troubles exist in the meantime should be addressed and, where needed, the laws revised and clarified.

Continue reading

Please share!

How Much More Evidence of Biden’s Corruption Do We Need?

By Rob Meyne

  • June 21, 2023
  • 3 min-read

You are probably aware of the corruption that has infested the DOJ in general and especially the FBI. No reasonable person can deny America’s law enforcement infrastructure operates with a double standard. If you are leftist, rich, in elite professions and well-connected families, you generally get lenient treatment.

Hunter Biden got a slap on the wrist for serious tax and gun crimes. Anyone with thirty seconds and access to a search engine knows people are routinely sentenced to prison for the exact offenses to which Hunter pleaded guilty.

The DOJ has said their investigation of Hunter Biden is ongoing. While one is tempted to be reassured by this, hoping he will eventually be held accountable for more extreme crimes, there is a better explanation. If they claim it is an ongoing investigation, they have yet another reason not to cooperate with Congressional investigators.

Even the two charges they filed were based on evidence in their possession since 2016. If it takes them seven years to decide to charge someone when the evidence is undisputed and overwhelming, it doesn’t bode well for effective enforcement of the law to return any time in the future.

Information that has come out from an IRS whistleblower, meanwhile, shows the FBI had possession of Hunter’s laptop and confirmed it was authentic in 2019. That is more information (as if we needed it) that the leadership of the FBI is corrupt, hypocritical, and completely in the tank for America’s leftist elites. Is there another conclusion one can reasonably draw?

The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and even at times the Democratic National Committee (often working through the White House) took great pains throughout the 2020 cycle to push news media and social platforms not to cover stories that were damaging to the Biden campaign. About 80% of the American people get most of their news from social media, so this is important. The DOJ and FBI told Twitter, for example, the Hunter laptop story was unconfirmed, possibly stolen or hacked. They knew at the time that wasn’t true.

In addition, 51 intelligence agency leaders said the story appeared to be “Russian disinformation” so the media would not cover it. Yet they had no personal knowledge of the situation, had not reviewed the information, and had no evidence of Russian involvement. It didn’t stop them from pushing for censorship. Meanwhile, post-election surveys show that about 1 in 6 Biden voters would not have voted for him if they had known about the corruption revealed on the laptop. (For the record, at no time has the Biden family even denied the laptop belonged to Hunter. The media and deep state reflexively went farther to defend the Bidens than they did themselves.)

Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA, signed the letter to help the Biden campaign. I’ve met Panetta and found him to be engaging and friendly. A fine guy with whom to share a cocktail. But a friend, who knows Panetta well, goes further. He says he is a great guy, a patriot, honest, and a straight shooter. BS. Panetta is a partisan hack, not to put too fine a point on it. You can be both charming and dishonest.

But the latest news is the new evidence of the attempt by Hunter to extort China to pay him $5 million for. The Federalist has the story, and it is linked here.

Hunter sent a message demanding payment and threatening to use his father, and his many friends, to hurt them, if they did not pay. Hunter’s associate in the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Zhau, then forwarded $5 million to Hunter. If that isn’t clear evidence of corruption at its highest level, nothing is.

Another revelation confirmed what was already obvious: the DOJ moves at a glacial pace to investigate the criminal activity of Dem leaders, if they look at it at all, and many investigations are simply halted. An IRS whistleblower has testified to this before Congress.

Biden needs to go, stat. Even if we are doomed to have some months under a Kamala Harris presidency, Biden is a threat who needs to be neutralized. There is too much at stake to have a president in office who is bought and paid for by hostile foreign powers.

Stay tuned.

Please share!

A Tragic Event in American History

By Rob Meyne

  • June 10, 2023
  • 5-min read

One of the most important, and tragic, events in American history occurred this week: the indictment of a former president on federal charges. This is unprecedented. Whatever you may think of former President Donald Trump, it says as much about the forces determined to stop him as it does about Trump himself. In no sense is this a good thing for the country.

It is easier to make decisions on most issues based on emotion and your own biases (factually based or not) than to make them based on facts and objectivity. This is such a case.

While we like to say we are a nation of laws, most decisions regarding who to prosecute involve an overwhelming amount of subjectivity. If you believe most prosecutions are based on facts alone then, with respect, you don’t know much about our system. Nearly all prosecutorial choices involve opinion, bias, and preferences. It is called “prosecutorial discretion.” The DA who indicted Trump in New York, for example, immediately upon taking office, reduced the charges against thousands of people accused of violent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The facts had not changed, only the opinion of the DA.

I’ll go further and say that any lawyer who doesn’t recognize the decision to charge Trump is unjustifiable based on past actions in similar cases – and doesn’t say so – is at this point a hypocrite not deserving of membership in the bar. Any political observer who doesn’t admit this is an entirely unjustified prosecution is also either uninformed, corrupt, or lying. If that is too pointed or confrontational for you, my apologies, and maybe this piece isn’t your cup of tea. The stakes are high and the time for timidity is gone.

How is that for direct? 😊 You know who you are! With love and apologies all around, the time for being afraid to express your opinion is gone. We are in many ways losing our country, and if you don’t work to preserve it, you are part of the problem.

The decision to charge Trump is politically driven. Period.

From the political side, it is very likely, in my view, that leading Democrats are pushing for prosecution of Trump because they know it will inflame his base and make his nomination more likely. They WANT Trump to be the nominee because they think they can beat him. At the same time, they know moderates and non-partisans will be hesitant to vote for someone under indictment or convicted.

The political ramifications will be interesting, but the legal outline is clear.

Every executive in Washington must follow a complex system of requirements and procedures for record-keeping. It is rare for Washington’s denizens NOT to violate a procedure, either intentionally or inadvertently. In almost all such cases there is either no punishment or only minor fines. That is what makes the Trump indictment indefensible. None of his predecessors has been subject to the same level of investigation, scrutiny, or potential sanctions.

Be clear: the DOJ works for the president and is taking actions to affect his leading opponent and to impact the election. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that should just, candidly, go home and stay there on Election Day, because they are hopelessly naïve.

Memos and emails have already shown the White House was involved in the decision to search Mar-A-Lago, even though President Joe Biden claimed he didn’t even know it was going to happen. This White House spews more lies in a week than Pinocchio did in a lifetime, and they aren’t even particularly clever about it.

Continue reading

Please share!

You’re Living in a Different World Than Everyone Else

By Rob Meyne

  • May 20, 2023
  • 4-min read

If you ever feel like you are living in a different world than your friends, neighbors, or work mates, it is because you are. We may reside on the same planet, but the specifics that make up our “worlds” are distinct in infinite ways.

Our opinions on political issues are often in conflict because they are based on a completely different understanding of the facts. It is hard to overstate how much this contributes to national division.

Constructive policy can be developed through collaboration and compromise. But it is difficult to do that when you don’t even agree on the facts. Since we’re not making decisions based on a common, agreed upon set of data, it is inevitable there will be huge disagreements.

A variety of dynamic factors have led to this.

For one, the way we get information has changed more dramatically in the past two decades than at any time since a guy named Guttenberg was doing his thing. Newspapers, broadcast TV, and radio are still around, but their influence is waning. Cable and streaming services exert tremendous influence, as do podcasts, social media, and various subscription services.

Mainstream “corporate” media is still powerful, but its role has been largely usurped by digital communications that are accessible wirelessly. This diversification in communications – the way information is conveyed – is unprecedented and getting more complex.

Two, governmental agencies, mainstream media, tech companies, political organizations, and NGOs are very good at coordinating their activities, suppressing speech, and promoting only those messages that meet their preferred narratives. If you don’t believe this, spend ten minutes looking at the “Twitter Files.” It is no longer deniable that the CIA, FBI, and even the Democratic National Committee are able to censor stories on Twitter and other platforms on an ongoing basis.

As artificial intelligence gets more pervasive, it will become the source of editorial direction that impacts everything we see. It will make it easier to censor even accurate information long before it has a chance to enter your newsfeed or inbox.

Continue reading

Please share!

If You Think the Parties Are the Same, Look Again

By Rob Meyne

  • May 9, 2023
  • 4-min read

Whose side are they on?

It is often argued there is little or no difference between America’s two major political parties. In all honesty, if you say there is NO difference between two options you are uninformed or lying. There most certainly are differences. The issue is how important are they?

The bottom line is this: the differences between the two parties are both few and essential. Yes, in many ways, each party is depressing and like the other. However, it is the few areas of distinction that make one party worthy of tentative support and the other deserving of unending derision.

As we’ve observed previously, the biggest factor that makes both party organizations distasteful is that they are composed of … wait for it … people. Many people are lovely and admirable, but far too many are corrupt, undependable, and narcissistic. And those are their GOOD qualities! 😊

All humans are to some extent dishonest. That’s like saying water is wet, the sun is bright, and Al Gore is boring. So how much sense does it make to clutch our pearls and whine about how our institutions have failed us when we know organizations are fundamentally flawed, from the start, because flawed humans are in charge of them?

Those who perennially throw up their hands in desperation and say “there is no one to vote for” are lamentably honest IF they are looking for perfect people to support. And if you’re looking for them, just stop it, please. You’re going to be disappointed.

People who are disappointed in political choices strike me as folks who don’t know much about life in general. What area of life offers you perfect choices? Do you have the perfect job, spouse, kids, house, car, or church? (I have a perfect wife, of course, but most don’t.) Most of life’s choices present us with alternatives between imperfect options. So what? They can still be marvelous. Perfection isn’t a necessary predicate for most of life. It makes no sense to expect it ONLY from government.

That doesn’t mean we don’t get to be disappointed. Of course we do. Anyone who wishes we had “better choices” has a lot in common with most of us. Who doesn’t? But focusing on primarily the negative aspect of candidates and parties isn’t likely to lead us to a better place.

Neither party is perfect. That is not the same thing as saying they are equal. They are not. The way our system is supposed to work is that people vote for a candidate that pledges to do things we want them to. We were never expected to vote for someone who we enjoy hanging out with, who we would like to see date our sister, or who you would hire to mow your lawn. We’re supposed to care about the policies that determine our quality of life and the future of our nation. And we’re supposed to vote for the people or party that support the policies that we do. It isn’t that complicated. Yet we act like we either can’t figure that out or care more about a person’s looks, personality, or tweeting habits than we do the well-being of the country.

But back to this: yes, the Republicans suck, but the Democrats suck even more. If that seems like a weak campaign slogan, it is. There are differences, even if neither party has earned your support. The parties are not the same, but the world looks different under Democratic leadership in 2023 than it did under Republican leadership in 2020. If you don’t see that, again, you just aren’t living on the same planet as we are.

Continue reading

Please share!

New York City … Or the Rotting Apple

By J Robert Smith

  • April 4, 2023
  • 2-min read

New York City was once celebrated as the “Big Apple.” Frank Sinatra sang about it. Small town and farm boys and girls dreamt about moving to NYC and making their marks. As Old Blue Eyes crooned, “If you can make there, you can make it anywhere, New York, New York”…

It used to be that the Bronx was notorious for poverty, crime, and squalor, but thanks to progressive Democrats (are there any other kind?), New York and it’s boroughs have become sumps of homelessness and crime. Under Giuliani and Bloomberg, Manhattan – midtown, anyway – was safe to walk at night. Midtown, then, was family-friendly. But who walks Manhattan at night, anywhere, particularly alone? Bring families?

Things started going downhill for the now Rotting Apple with the election of Warren Wilhelm Jr, aka, Bill de Blasio. De Blasio, the “social justice warrior,” who started to make lawbreakers and hardened criminals into victims. Who started to tight-leash the once-vaunted NYPD. Warren started turning NYC into a version of the dystopic novel, A Clockwork Orange, where the thugs, murderers, and rapists owned the streets, especially nights.

After Warren, New York voters, in their infinite wisdom, elected Eric Adams mayor. One is hard-pressed to decide which of the two is the dumber progressive box-checker. Since de Blasio has faded into the woodwork – for the time being – and Adams currently holds the office, we’ll say Adams, because he’s The Guy, who, along with every other office-holding progressive Democrat in NYC, is driving New York into the ground.

While Adams pushes pot smoking on the late night shows and laughs it up with cronies, nights, at some of New York’s finer eateries and watering holes (Adams has a security detail, so he doesn’t have to worry about burgeoning street crime), all sorts of New Yorkers have to watch their backs for attacks and/or being accosted by homeless looking for a buck… Or having to play dodge ’em on city sidewalks. Dodge the piles of human feces or vomit and puddles of urine. Oh, and syringes, because shooting up in the streets ain’t so bad anymore in the Rotting Apple.

Trump’s indictment by New York’s other big dolt, Manhattan District Attorney, Fat Alvin Bragg, merely underscores New York’s growing reputation as a Third World banana republic. Not only is Bragg a Soros tool, who obediently follows the script handed to him by letting off hardened criminals to terrorize New Yorkers – the old, disabled, poor, and disproportionately people “of color” (black-on-black crime is soaring). After all, when you think of Rio, what do you think of other than its annual decadent Carnival? Scads of government corruption, impotent or bribed cops, widespread filth, rampant crime, open-air drug markets, and plenty of real victims.

Rio is where the Rotting Apple is heading – without the flare of Carnival, unless St, Paddy’s Day is thoroughly debauched by “progressive” New Yorkers. Don’t bet against that.

If you don’t think that New York can’t be reduced to has-been status, take a look at Detroit. Detroit was once a thriving, world-class manufacturing powerhouse. Over the course of two short decades – the 60s and 70s – Detroit was reduced to the wreck it is today. It’s never recovered. It may never, ever recover. Does the same fate await NYC?

Please share!

There Are Two Sexes, not 498,304,840

By Rob Meyne

  • Feb. 9, 2023
  • 3-min read

If twenty-five years ago you had been able to peer into the future and see what we would be debating in 2023, you probably would not have believed it. Today we are divided on questions for which there are clear, logical, scientific, and common-sense answers. Yet for reasons of woke ideology and political correctness, we pretend there are not.

Anyone who says we have lost our collective minds can make a decent case for it.

A concomitant problem is that we do ourselves, and our progeny, a disservice by spending so much time talking about things that are manifestly less important to our collective future than many other issues that go unattended. No wonder so many younger people think they are justified in focusing on their personal problems — is someone using the wrong pronoun? — rather than concentrating on building knowledge and skills that will help them become happy and successful.

We spend scarce time and resources quibbling about what is the right pronoun to use for a specific individual, but surprisingly little collective attention is devoted to an open southern border, skyrocketing fentanyl deaths, or crippling inflation.

One of the issues that seems to be a top priority for the federal leviathan, media, and the politically correct crowd is gender identification. If there were ever questions that have obvious answers, but millions bend over backwards to ignore them, it is them. Let us offer a few points.

Continue reading

Please share!

With McDaniel’s Reelection, the GOP Establishment Doubles Down

By J Robert Smith

  • Jan. 28, 2023
  • 3-min read

During last year’s midterm elections, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thumbed his nose at the GOP’s conservative base. He now famously said that the crop of America First Senate candidates were lackluster, at best. Now, why would wily old Mitch say that? Oh, to pour cold water on the chances of Arizona’s Blake Masters, Georgia’s Hershel Walker, and New Hampshire’s Don Bolduc to raise money and build grassroots support. But, principally, old Mitch wanted to dampen down fundraising for these men.

Then Mitch pulled Senate Republican dollars from Masters and Bolduc, while sending millions to help his crony, Lisa Murkowski, win against fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska. The deck was already stacked against Tshibaka when Murkowski and her allies pushed through ranked choice voting. Without that fix and McConnell’s heft, Murkowski would have lost.

To make matters much worse, after the elections, McConnell helped Democrats pass an obscenely costly budget, to the tune of $1.7 trillion. McConnell didn’t want the new GOP House majority – not yet sworn in – to interfere with the binge spending that he heartily approves of.

Now, Ronna McDaniel was just reelected Republican National Committee chair. She won decisively with 111 votes out 168. The RNC is controlled by establishment Republicans who despise Donald Trump, the America First movement, and grassroots conservatives generally. They’re a subset of the Washington establishment and serve, for the most part, as the Democrat Party’s shadow. It’s the Washington establishment versus the grassroots, and we know where GOP mossbacks stand – against us.

Harmeet Dhillon — a smart, shrewd, politically savvy lawyer and longtime activist — was the insurgent candidate for the chair. She’s also one of Trump’s lawyers defending him against the relentless onslaught from Democrats and establishment to destroy him.

Dhillon made these charges against McDaniel, per the New York Post:

Continue reading

Please share!

Why I Returned to Twitter

By J Robert Smith

  • Dec. 14, 2022
  • 3 min read

In January of 2021, when Twitter brass suspended Donald Trump’s very popular and powerful account, it was the last straw for me.

I’d been on Twitter since the autumn of 2013, as I recall. By July 2020, with a lot of sweat equity, I’d built my account to nearly 16,000 followers. I was adding an estimated 100-200 followers daily during that tumultuous summer. The riots and general lawlessness that Democrats were permitting in the cities they ran were fueling my following. Then there was the contentious presidential race. With frequent posts about the Trump-Biden dustup, my profile was rising and reach spreading. A conservative surging in popularity was always a red flag among Twitter’s woke monitors.

Then, suddenly, my new followers slowed to a trickle. Some days, nothing. Then over the course of the next few weeks, my existing following started to dwindle. I went to a Germany-based platform that determines if your Twitter account is being “shadow-banned,” among other surreptitious means of muzzling members conservatives. My account was being shadow-banned.

Went the reports, Twitter was allegedly purging “bots,” phony accounts. By November 2020, as I recollect, I’d lost about 4,000 followers. Sure, bots have been and are a problem at Twitter. They inflate Twitter’s aggregate count. Twitter’s member volume helps sell advertising and ups pricing.

But purging bots in the middle of a hotly contested election season? Elon Musk questioned Twitter’s price tag in negotiations because, he contended, the platform’s value was inflated by Twitter execs allowing bots to increase its value. Seems a little too coincidently, doesn’t it?

Continue reading

Please share!

Georgia GOP Playing Wrong Game in Warnock-Walker Runoff

By J Robert Smith

  • Dec. 3, 2022
  • 5-min read

If we could go “Back to the Future” in the 1990s, the likes of James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala (Bill’s Clinton’s hired guns) would tell us that elections today are “About the ballots, stupid.” And, as much as conservative grassroots and Republicans detest hearing that, it’s true. Thanks to the infamous Covid lockdowns, changes made to election laws in the states, early voting and mail-in balloting have dramatically altered the elections landscape.

Democrats are gleefully stealing marches in mail-in voting, in particular. It’s a monumental tactical error for Republicans and Trump activists to urge voters to wait until Election Day to vote. Why? Because not all pro-Republican voters get out to vote, for various reasons. Democrats no longer try to persuade voters to vote. They’ve put in place systems to obtain their target voters’ ballots early.

Case in point, the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff between incumbent Ralph Warnock and Hershel Walker. The election finale is this Tuesday, December 6.

The betting is that Warnock has a slight edge because the instant Democrats were free to start extracting ballots from their voters, they did so. Not haphazardly, mind you, but systematically. It doesn’t appear that Georgia Republicans are doing anything comparable. That may prove fatal.

From ABC News, December 3:

Georgians swarmed to the polls on the last day of early voting before next week’s Senate runoff, setting a new record for single-day early in-person turnout.

At least 352,953 people voted in person on Friday, bringing the total number of votes, either in person or absentee, to over 1.8 million. That number represents 26.4% of active voters.

Of course, we can’t know for certain that more of those votes are Democrat or Republican ballots, but it appears the trend is repeating itself. Like the 2022 general elections in Georgia and elsewhere, Democrats are clocking the GOP in mail-in and early voting.

From CNN Politics, December 1:

So far in early voting, Black voters make up a little more than 33% of the electorate, while White voters account for 54%. At a roughly similar point in the general election based on the number of early votes cast, about 31% of voters were Black and about 57% were White.

This may seem like a small difference, but given the large partisan gap between Black and White voters, it suggests that those who have gone to the polls so far are more Democratic than at a similar point in the general election.

I should note that a number of Democratic counties opened up early in-person voting sooner than Republican-leaning counties. That said, voters in all Georgia counties have been able to cast a ballot for a number of days now, and the racial voting gap between the general election and runoff has not gone away.

Continue reading

Please share!