America needs to get off the dime.

 

America is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats.  The Georgia elections were very close, nearly 50-50.  The US Senate has 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats.  The US House has the narrowest margin in years, only about 5 more Democrats than Republicans.  For a body of 425 members, 5 is very close.  As a result or this even Steven split, it is impossible to get anything done.  Congress has done very little in recent years.  They need to do something about the DACA children.  They need to do immigration reform.  And a lot of other things.  But, being split so evenly, they don’t have the votes to pass anything.  

   The Republicans need to attract more voters.  Trump did some good work in this area.  He attracted a lot of union voters, a lot of black and minority voters.  It wasn’t quite enough to get him re elected, but it was close. 

   American political parties run on ideology, a platform, and personalities.  Republican ideology comes from the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal”.  Republicans were started as the party to free the slaves.  Republicans fought the Civil War.  In the 1960’s Republicans passed the Civil rights acts.  Republicans believe in free enterprise and capitalism as the system that creates vast amounts of wealth.  Under free enterprise factories and farms and everything else is owned by individuals or groups of individuals (corporations) and the owners are strongly motivated to run them efficiently. Republicans believe in American exceptionalism, the notion that America has a glorious history of which we should be proud. 

    Party platforms were more specific lists of laws the party would support, and other laws the party would oppose.  In recent years both parties have pretty much stopped doing platforms.  Partly because it is hard to come up with a platform that everybody in the party approves.  Partly because advocating specific acts gains the party more enemies than it gains them friends.  And probably other reasons as well.  Net result, no platforms for this last election. 

  And finally, personalities.  Right now the biggest personality in the Republican Party is Donald Trump.  He will be around for quite a while.  Nobody else in the party, Cruz, Rubio, Graham, McConnell, Romney, and you-name-him is as big as Trump.  Unfortunately Trump has as many bitter enemies as he has die hard supporters. 

   Looking at this I can suggest Republicans need to talk about the party ideology more often.  They need to get a platform out.  They need to recruit more personalities, especially electable personalities.  Republicans used to get personalities from the military, Eisenhower, Powell, and McCain for example.  We don’t seem to have that many military men with strong reputations to recruit as we used to.

Beat The Press. An hour about the Capitol riots

 Chuck Todd was in full voice this morning.  Spent the entire one hour show talking about Wednesday's Capitol Riot.  Blamed it all on Trump.  Called for impeachment, a bill of attainder, everything.  

  Did not mention the three resignations of capitol security chiefs.  No mention of the video showing Capitol police standing back and letting the rioters stream into the building.    No mention of the Rasmussen poll showing Trump's approval rating rising since Wednesday.

Fox News needs to move the studio to a quieter part of town

 I watch Fox (in case  you had not guessed).  They have fire sirens, police sirens, ringing telephones, and a bunch of other noise in the background of the news stories.  Pain in the A**.  I hear this stuff coming off the TV set  and I start looking out my windows for the fire trucks.  They ought to move the studio to a quieter part of town. 

So what is Parler's Beef?

 Apple has threatened to toss Parler off their Apps Store unless Parler applies the same heavy handed censorship of conservatives that Facebook and Twitter are starting to do.  

Why does Parler need anything from anyone's app store?  I think they can make Parler work by just putting up a website and having the users go to the website and read and comment.  That works for most web places right now.  If for some obscure reason Parler needs to load code onto user's desktops or smartphones, then they just put up a website and let the users download the code over the web.  What's so hard about that?  

So what's the beef??

The democrats, the MSM, all Trump's enemies, blame him for the DC riot

And all of them are so overjoyed to have Trump supporters doing the rioting.  And so they all say the riots are Trump's fault.  It makes them all sooo happy.  It fits the narrative.

   But, the DC police chief, the House Sergeant-at-Arms and the Senate Sergeant-at-arms have resigned their offices, which says to me that security precautions were not taken, or not taken enough to prevent the break ins at the Capitol.  If they thought they had done a good job, they would not be resigning.  I think they all believed that Republicans and Trump supporters are peaceful and law abiding and don't break into buildings.  A small group of fanatical troublemakers worked their way up to the front of the mob and started breaking doors and windows.  Once the way was opened, a whole bunch of normally decent law abiding people in the crowd followed the troublemakers into the building. 

Facebook and Twitter hurt themselves

 By banning Trump.  The social media giants don't like The Donald, but 74 million Americans voted for him and will log into Twitter and/or Facebook just to see what Trump has to say.  Trump is still the president of the US and a whole bunch of people want to keep up with him.  Locking Trump off of Twitter and Facebook just kills their ratings, which is what advertisers pay for.  I believe the phrase is "shooting yourself in the foot."   The TV networks,NBC CBS and ABC, don't like Trump any more than Facebook or Twitter do but they never failed to put Trump coverage on because Trump is good for ratings. 

Rioters storm Capitol Building

 I don't approve.  Rioters breaking into our legislative chambers is the sort of thing they do in South America, not in the United States of America.  On the other hand it does show we have a lot of really pissed off people.  Messing with the election will do this to people. 

   They should have had enough cops, secret service, capital police, US Army, National Guard, FBI, you name them, to keep the rioters out.  Somebody did not prepare properly for this one.  I don't know who "somebody" is.  Will our noble MSM mention the name? 

The DC mayor declared a curfew for 6 PM.  Too late, it is full dark at 5 PM in DC.  You want to get people off the streets before it gets dark.  

Let's hope things simmer down.  If this kinda stuff keeps happening, it will give Joe Biden a lot of grief.