Account information for this Lucianne member

Some issues are no-brainers for politicians: Transexuals in women’s sports and girl’s bathrooms. Showing an ID to vote. Securing the border. Enforcing the criminal laws. Judging people by merit. These are 80/20 issues where 80% of the citizens are on one side and only 20% are on the other. Being on the 20% side of 80/20 issues is not a winning election strategy. We saw that in 2024. Therefore, the big thinkers in the Democratic Party are preaching that Democrats need to shift over to the 80% side on these 80/20 issues.

I thought whaaaat . . . this must because stupid people are eating the Tide Pods. After all, most of the merchandise in this Kroger grocery store is edible. (Not so much the chicken.) But, no, it was because stupid people were stealing them. People were stealing so much laundry detergent that my grocery store had to put it behind locked glass doors. To buy some, you ring a bell and an employee comes to unlock the case for you. This is for a $12 item, mind you. (It’s not clear to me how this procedure prevents theft. Can’t the thief still walk out with the merchandise?

In my day, we did stuff. We used to shoot things. We made things. We broke things. We fixed things. We burned things. We drove things. We drank. We cussed. We learned. We chewed. We partied. We dated. We . . . well, you get the point. We did stuff. Not anymore. Shooting is politically incorrect unless the target is a businessman or a conservative figure. Nobody makes anything – they do that in China. Fixing stuff isn’t cost efficient – you just buy a new one. Drinking is down. Dating is done alone in the basement on the internet.

The latest battle in the gerrymandering wars took place in Virginia. The Democrats in Virginia had all the guns – they control the governorship, the legislature and a majority of the voters. In a classic example of “Ready-Fire-Aim,” the Democrats promptly used those guns to shoot themselves in the foot. It all started a few years ago, back when Virginia was a purplish state. Voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to establish a non-partisan procedure for drawing Congressional Districts.

There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination. First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.

Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population. Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total. Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing. first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.

A few weeks ago, Iran had lost every battle but was winning the war. The regime had survived, even though its putative leader and probably his son and many others had not. That’s because the Iranian regime was still raking in billions in the oil market, Moreover, they were disrupting the oil market for the rest of the world. That disruption benefited the regime doubly. It garnered a higher price for their oil, and it incentivized the world to push for America to back off. Dependably venal and dependably short-term in its outlook and dependably anti-American, the world did as instructed.

The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations. The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress. This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.

It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history. Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings. Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar. I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job. Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit.

In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe. This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer. But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.

Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.” Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.