Immigration Policy

 At this point, I would not be overly surprised to see a picture of a PLA brigade, infantry, artillery, and armor, lined up at the border near Tijuana, to get their free California drivers licenses and (Democrat) voter registration cards.

Governor Newsom would be welcoming them as a replacement for the "racist, homophobic, sexist, etc, etc, police departments" now being dismissed all over the state.

Local Control - Colorado

 Jon Caldera has a nice piece up at Complete Colorado describing in great detail what the notion of "local control" means to Democrats. Bottom line, the state can make living here as onerous as they want, and localities are permitted to make it worse. But only worse.

For myself, I've been ready to decamp to a freer location for the last 10 years as I see Colorado becoming East California, and no real chance of it ever being reversed. After all, our Secretary of State has assured us that we have the cleanest election process in the country, and it's so free of taint that she has issued a ruling that it shall be illegal to investigate any aspect of it.

The reason I'm still here is my spouse, who sees proximity to her sister and daughter as being worth any inconvenience the state wants to impose. She reminds me of a prisoner in the State pen who has served his sentence, but doesn't want to leave because all his friends are there.

Reading the Auguries

 Noting that the Dow has lost 2000 points in the last 2 weeks, thousands of "migrants" are beginning to move toward our southern border, and that the Chicoms are moving troops down near Taiwan. I'm wondering if this is happening in anticipation of a Biden win. It's a rather depressing outlook.

Get Trump – Chapter 6?

At least 6.

Started out with the locker room talk scandal, but as Trump never presented himself as a plaster saint, it didn't carry any weight.

Next came the Russia. Russia, Russia. Trumps energy policies pulled the rug out from under the Russians, and Gen Mattis put a stop to their more egregious adventurism in the middle east so unless Putin was trying to undermine his own country, the charge against Trump made no sense.

As a by-product of the Russia fiasco, the involvement of the DNC and Clinton campaign in the Steele dossier became painfully obvious.

The impeachment effort filled headlines daily with people increasingly noticing that it served as an excuse for the House to do nothing else. I suppose that if you know that whatever the House does will be stopped in the Senate, and vice versa, there must be little incentive to even show up for work.

The involvement of the Chinese in stealing everything they could get their hands on in the US and adventurism abroad was met with resistance which the left tried, unsuccessfully to label as racism.

The virus problem was used as an excuse to shut down the fastest growing economy ever seen and mute Trumps claims to economic success. Used as an attack on Trump, it worked, but it worked sort of like setting off a giant stink bomb in a crowded elevator. The Chinese are trying to blame the virus on Trump. So far, no one is buying that. Trump is trying to get people back to work and is meeting strong resistance from the Dems who would prefer we all stayed home and starved.

Now comes the latest attack: The George Floyd riots. Note that the riots are happening in Donk controlled cities, and that the municipal administrations are for the most part, siding with the rioters. Black Lives Matter? Not really. If they did, the riots would be put down, the Antifas would be jailed, and black-owned businesses would not be burned out. Unemployed blacks are victims and as such are actively courted by the Dems. It's a good thing since the last time we had unemployment this high they elected their president 4 times in a row.

The riots being municipal level disturbances, the president has limited ability to jump in and put them down. It's a local problem after all. Somehow Trump is expected to come up with a Federal solution to local police problems while the house panders to black nationalists and tacitly supports their militia, Antifa. As such, I expect the left will be actively supporting the riots all the way through November with calls for more every time some thug of the right pigmentation gets shot by a cop in the commission of a crime. They will probably call for more if Trump gets reelected to protest “Vote Suppression”, something that can be investigated through his second term. Get out in the street, wave a sign, spread plague, burn your house down, and vote Dem. It's a safe bet that if a Dem becomes President, money for the rioters will dry up over night.

Every Monday, for the last 3-1/2 years, we've been told that the coming Friday would be the big day with Trump frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs. I'm still hearing this. I expect to hear it until 2024, unless the election turns into a huge landslide of voters fed up with Dem shenanigans who hand Trump a second term with both the House and Senate. In that case, the republicans will revert to form and spend most of their time attacking each other.

Prosperity Comes, Prosperity Goes

The Wall St Journal today has a lead editorial (paywall) describing how, in addition to population shifts from one state to another, the bigger story may well be the shift in state GDP that moves along with it. It doesn't move directly with the population of course, if one rich entrepreneur moves out of a state and takes his business with him, it has a much greater effect on the states economy that having several hundred "refugees" with no notable talents beyond an ability to apply for assistance and vote Democratic.

Shining examples of how not to do it include the usual suspects, California and New York, with special mention of the way population flows reversed in Connecticut after they established an income tax, and then raised it annually to one of the highest on the east coast.

Mentioned on the other end as a net gainer, is Colorado, where I live. We've seen a modest increase in state GDP over the last few years as disgruntled Californians and Chicagoan's move here to escape the taxes and regulation that have made their former home states such garden spots. A word of warning to any more who might be considering the move: The legislature this year has several taxation bills on offer that would eliminate our TABOR law which allows the taxpayers a veto over taxation proposals and establishes a modest 4.2% state income tax rate.

The problem with TABOR is that the now democratic-controlled legislature has a lot of splendid and worthwhile projects they would like to impose on us, and has discovered that the state cash cows are not providing enough milk to fund them. At the same time, there is a strong party-based movement to penalize charter schools as they seem to have a way of making the public schools look bad. The solution to all these problems is: Higher Taxes and no accountability. The legislature has some 30 proposals slated for the upcoming ballot which would abolish Tabor, make the income tax progressive, drive the oil and gas industry (5.6%* of the states economy) out of the state, and impose crushing burdens on the charter schools. Oh and did I mention, give Colorado's electoral college votes to California and New York?

Locally the powers that be in Denver and some of the surrounding towns are trying to make themselves more tolerant of the homeless. We all know how that worked out in L.A. and Portland. It's heading that way here with 2 or 3 panhandlers on every significant surface intersection in town.

Colorado look like a nice place to move to? Don't worry, by the end of 2020, if the legislature gets its way, it will be just as desirable as California or Chicago.

*Revised down. real numbers seem to be hard to come by and if you want a second opinion, that's easy as 6 or 7 will pop up on any search.

Geography Lesson

The moral high ground is NOT located on top of a pile of dead children.

Questions About The Norks

Li'l Fat Kim has just tested a missile roughly equivalent to a Titan II only with a mobile launcher similar to, but much bigger than the one proposed for our Midgetman ICBM. Having worked on this sort of stuff myself, I can assure you that the design and building of them is non trivial and quite expensive. Seeing all this technological advancement from a country that is probably the economic equivalent of Detroit makes me wonder.

The story on the launchers is that they were provided to the Norks by the Chinese (surprise, surprise) ostensibly to be used to transport logs with their timbering industry. Nice story. The launchers are big, heavy, and relatively inflexible thus requiring some pretty good roads to operate on. Yes, they can run on dirt roads, but the dirt needs to be deep hard packed gravel and not the sort of thing that turns to mud every spring, and winds tightly up the sides of mountains.

The Norks have also had a great run of good luck with the missiles in test with only a few failures before running like they had been extensively tested already, like in China for example.

Found this pic at Theo Spark. I'm thinking that it's missing the hand of Chinese God-King* Xi stuck up Kims butt. Also Chinese missile and troop movements to the North of China and along the NK border make it look like Xi is trying to goad Trump into attacking Kim so the Chinese can intervene on behalf of their brothers like they did the last time. It would be unlike the Chinese to toss a useful ally/stooge like Kim summarily under the bus although for the right price...

There are currently 3 U.S. Carrier groups hovering around N.K. In the event of hostilities, I would be trivially easy for Kim to launch 3 of his smaller missiles in a nuclear ballistic attack against them. To the best of my knowledge, the carriers have only limited defenses against such an attack although the missile frigates accompanying them might well surprise us. With the "unfortunate loss" of the carriers, the Chinese buildup in the South China Sea goes on pretty much unchallenged and the Norks take the fall.

Or maybe my blood sugar is a bit low this morning.

UPDATE: Others have noticed as well.

*It is an Emperors prerogative of course to call himself anything he wants. The Chinese have already published a New Revised Koran and made possession of old ones illegal. Additionally the Chinese Government has taken it upon itself to appoint the senior leadership of the Catholic Church in China, and is encouraging all Christians to replace aging images of Jesus with similar images of Xi.

Disaster Relief

It seems the recent weather in Florida and Texas is impacting my lifestyle all the way up here in Colorado! I like to make my breakfast pancakes with some Hominy added to the batter. It improves the flavor and the protein content. Just the other day, I used the last of the supply here. Today D'wife tells me that King Soopers is out of the stuff on account of the suppliers down south being temporarily shut down due to weather.

Outrageous! Where's FEMA when you need them?

Oh well, I hear things are getting back to normal or what passes for that in Dixie, so I expect to see my favorite pancake stuffing back on the shelves shortly.

What Government Does Well

There are 2 things that government does well:
1. Cause problems, and
2. Make them worse.

Both seem to require ever larger sums of money.