"A Republic...If We could Keep it"

 

Back when our country was founded, there was an undercurrent of values, despite of clawing a civilization out of the wilderness, there was a underpinning of shared values, of shared honor, where a man's word was his bond, a handshake was a binding contract amongst men. and if one broke such a contract, he was ostracized by others to such an extent that banishment was usually the result.  There was a shared Judeo-Christian values, a faith in God, and a "Manafest Destiny" played a part.  THere was a belief that with  honest hard work and ingenuity  that anything was possible.  So different from today, where we have a huge underclass that is proud to not work and grift from the government.   There is a phrase that was Alec de Tocceville(This is from memory mind you), " When a populace can vote themselves largess from the public treasury, tyranny will follow".. This was written in the 18th century about the fall of the "Athenian Republic" 2500 years prior.

  I clipped this from Farcebook

Before being fully caffeinated this morning an idea began to form. It then percolated while packing boxes and moving heavy objects throughout the day, I thought about Ben Franklin’s response to a very specific question. As the story goes, when exiting the last meeting of the body drafting America’s constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the new nation would have. He replied:

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

If you have been paying attention to the fraud numbers coming out of Minnesota, California, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, it seems clear that one of – and perhaps THE – most grave dangers we face as a constitutional Republic is the inability of our government to police itself.

If there is one lesson to take from the past 50 years, this is it.

America seems deeply in the bog described by Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic warning:

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

Unfortunately, the broken chains of the Constitution have failed to contain the federal government.

I know that repeating my favorite quote of John Adams is getting tedious, but when most read it, they think Adams was talking about religion in government – but that was only part of it:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’m suddenly reminded of my second favorite John Adams quote, that, when taken in context with the preceding Adams wisdom leads me to my point:

“Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.”

Adams believed deeply in constitutional government, representation, and liberty. What he feared was pure democracy untethered from restraints, virtue, law, or institutional balance.

In the founders’ vocabulary, “democracy” often meant direct mass rule driven by passion rather than deliberation. Adams, like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, believed that human nature included ambition, envy, passion, tribalism, and susceptibility to demagogues. Their answer was a constitutional republic with separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances, and protections for property and minority rights.

He was saying that absent men and women of honor and character who swear and exhibit total and absolute fealty to the Constitution of the United States, there is no force on earth capable of policing, adjudicating and controlling the whims of a fickle, feckless and faithless government.

None.

There is simply no way for the fraud schemes that we now know existed (continue to exist?) could have happened without the knowledge of government officials at some level.

And the put come based interpretations of the Constitution­, where the ends justify the means, and a desire to stretch it to “make” law and create “rights” out of whole cloth—leads inexorably to arbitrary and selective application of those laws. When capriciousness becomes the order of the day, instead of a government rooted in a respect for just law, the illegitimacy of government is the natural progression.

When a regime has control of Congress and inhabits an executive that sees the Constitution as an archaic hindrance incapable of comprehending “modern” issues, tyranny is only one vote away.

A Republic is the only defense we have against such rapine majoritarian tyranny.

Politicians should be measured using the Constitution as a yardstick and not their legislative “effectiveness” in bringing home the pork or how much money they spend with Madison Avenue to get elected.

Using this scale, most in DC today would fare none too well.

"Good Ole Rockytop"

 I hurriedly cut and pasted this this morning.   I normally try to prep the post the day before....not today...The democrats have been gerrymandering for decades, they have totally squeezed all the republican representation out of the northeast and out of illinois.  Finally the GOP is doing the same thing and the donks are crying fake tears of outrage.  I believe it took Trump to put spine in the normally jellyfish GOP.

Dems are having a less than optimal week. SCOTUS tanked racial gerrymandering, Tennessee redrew its boundaries to eliminate a Humanoid Hemorrhoid named Steve Cohen, and SCOVA aborted the 10-1 redistricting love child of Obama, Extreme Hakeem, and Abby Spanberger.

There is probably nothing less racist than the redistricting fight in Tennessee this week, despite the immediate cries of racism from the usual corners. What happened was not racial. It was political. There is a difference, and pretending otherwise is part of the reason Americans no longer trust the people framing these debates.

It is no secret that African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democrat. In Memphis, those voting patterns are among the most predictable in the country. Once the Supreme Court substantially narrowed the role race can play in redistricting decisions, Tennessee Republicans did what Democrats have been doing for decades in states like Illinois, New York and Maryland: they targeted an opposing party stronghold and tried to dilute its political influence. That is not some uniquely Southern tomfoolery.

It is just modern American politics practiced openly and aggressively by both parties. The move by Republicans in the Volunteer State was naked political aggression, but legal naked political aggression.

The key point is this: Memphis-area voters were not targeted because they were black. They were targeted because they reliably elect Democrats, specifically longtime Congressman Steve Cohen. If Memphis had been a heavily white urban district voting 80 percent Republican for forty years, Democrats would be trying to carve it apart with exactly the same enthusiasm Republicans are showing now.

What makes the outrage especially selective is the history of Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District itself. The modern majority-minority version of the district did not emerge naturally from geography or community cohesion. It was largely engineered during the redistricting cycle following the 1980 Census, when lawmakers centered the district around the heavily African American urban core of Memphis. That configuration emerged during the peak era of Voting Rights Act enforcement and under enormous federal pressure to create districts where minority voters could reliably elect candidates of their choice.

No federal judge sat down with a map and drew the district personally. Tennessee legislators drew the boundaries themselves, but they did so under the unmistakable understanding that failing to create or preserve majority-minority districts could bring lawsuits, Justice Department objections, or direct federal intervention. Throughout the South, heavily African American urban populations were consolidated into safe Democrat districts while surrounding suburban and rural districts became whiter and more Republican. Both parties quietly benefited from the arrangement.

In other words, the district itself was already the product of intentional political engineering. The only thing that changed this week is which party benefits from the engineering.

And that is where the whole performance becomes difficult to take seriously.

Is the most entertaining part that the congressman representing this “racially sacred” district is himself white? Steve Cohen has represented a majority-black district for years without Democrats objecting that the seat somehow “belongs” to an African American representative.

Or is the more revealing part that Democrats have spent staggering sums of money ($80-$100 million) over recent election cycles trying to prevent a black Republican woman from winning election to the House from Tennessee?

Apparently racial representation is vitally important and sacrosanct right up until the minority candidate stops voting the way progressive activists demand.

That contradiction exposes the real issue. Much of modern political rhetoric about race is not actually about race at all. It is about preserving political power while framing opposition as morally illegitimate. When Democrats draw districts to maximize partisan advantage in New York or Illinois, it is called protecting democracy. When Republicans do the same thing in Tennessee, it suddenly becomes an existential threat to civil rights.

Americans are expected to pretend these are fundamentally different activities when they are often nearly identical tactics wrapped in different moral packaging.

None of this means redistricting is noble, but it does mean melanin content should never have anything to do with it.

Gerrymandering is ugly no matter who does it, and I have never been a fan of it, but as long as Democrat states where Republicans get 40% of the vote but have zero Republican representatives, they can spare me their crocodile tears and threats. If Americans are going to have an honest discussion about representation, then honesty has to begin with admitting that both parties manipulate district boundaries for partisan gain whenever they possess the power to do so.

Tennessee did not invent that game. It simply stopped pretending not to play it.

Florida is doing the same.

Being a Ole Miss fan, I can’t stand that god-awful orange. It’s not in my color palette but I am not above a rousing rendition of Rocky Top to celebrate Republicans finally growing a set and playing some bare-knuckled politics.

"Heads I win, Tails, You are a threat to Democracy"

 Was supposed to drop last Thursday....but it didn't happen, and I didn't catch it until Sunday Morning.

I clipped this from Michael Smith off farcebook,  The cartoons came from my *Stash*

Interesting to watch Democrats take both sides of arguments.

For example, when they make arguments for and against gerrymandering at the same time (good when they do it, bad when someone else does) and the same when it comes to free speech (our speech is protected, yours is disinformation and violence, so not protected), you begin to understand how a political party that has come to be built on radical, irrational positions can survive.

When you consider how standing on both sides can be true, you come to understand that their power is based on two things - process and structure - and the control of both - and not the will of the people.

They depend upon controlling the processes of government and defining a structure that gives them permissions that are denied to anyone else (packing the Supreme Court, racially gerrymandered districts, and potential statehood for DC and PR are “structural” changes that would advantage Democrats).

The last thing they want is a true representative republic that freely expresses the actual will of the people. That, my dear friends, is why they drone on and on about “democracy” because through process and structure, the outputs of “democracy” can be controlled and managed to produce a desired outcome - and when it doesn’t, it can be ignored.

At first glance, this looks like hypocrisy. At a surface level we all understand, it is, but stopping there misses the more important point. This isn’t random inconsistency or careless contradiction. It reflects a deeper operating logic and one that prioritizes control over process and structure rather than persuasion or consensus.

If you can control the process, you don’t have to win the argument. If you can shape the structure, you don’t have to rely on the unpredictable will of the electorate.

That’s where the conversation moves from rhetoric to strategy. Consider the recurring calls to restructure foundational elements of American governance: expanding the Supreme Court, admitting new states like Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, or drawing districts in insane ways to lock in durable advantages. Each of these proposals is framed in moral or democratic language of fairness, representation, and equity, but each also has a clear and predictable partisan effect. They are not neutral reforms, they are structural adjustments designed to produce specific political outcomes.

From this perspective, the apparent contradictions begin to make sense. If your primary objective is to secure and maintain power through institutional means, then consistency in argument becomes secondary. What matters is whether a given position advances or threatens that objective in the moment.

This also helps explain the persistent emphasis on the language of “democracy.” It is invoked constantly, almost reflexively, as both justification and shield but the word itself does a lot of heavy lifting. Democracy, in its pure form, suggests majority rule—the unfiltered expression of the people’s will. Yet the reality of modern governance is far more mediated. Processes can be designed, rules can be written, and structures can be built in ways that shape outcomes long before a single vote is cast.

In other words, if you control the inputs, you can largely predict—and manage—the outputs, and when the outputs don’t align with expectations, the response is often not reflection but recalibration. Change the rules. Adjust the structure. Redefine the terms. The goal is not to abandon the system, but to refine it until it produces the “correct” results.

I think the 2020 election is a prime example.

I have stated before that I personally don’t have evidence the 2020 election was corrupt – but I also don’t have evidence it wasn’t. I think the brilliance of Democrat operatives was that while the GOP was snoozing, they began efforts in key states years before election day 2020 to shape the process to their advantage – the Covid pandemic was a godsend that shot a mix of steroids and adrenaline directly into mainline arteries of a sort of legal malfeasance and gamesmanship.

Mail out/mail in ballots that were simply not traceable, ballot “drop boxes” and ballot “harvesting” served to create a situation where ballots could be corrupted before they were counted under prying eyes, and combined with relaxed validation processes, made finding proof of chicanery virtually impossible. No amount of recounting cooked ballots, the origin of which was impossible to determine, would change the outcome but it would produce results consistently enough to defend against challenges. Or as we saw, would reveal only minor issues that could be used to substantiate the “it’s just a very few bad actors but not enough to change outcomes” defense.

Ironically, finding just a few fraudulent operators served to justify the premise the entire election was clean – the most secure ever as we were told.

To me, this kind of “management” of outcomes is why the tension between a true representative republic and the modern conception of managed democracy is becoming harder to ignore. A representative republic depends on the idea that political outcomes should reflect the will of the people, even when that will produces inconvenient or undesirable results. A system focused on process and structural control, by contrast, seeks to minimize that unpredictability.

So, what looks like contradiction on the surface is, in reality, a kind of coherence just not the kind rooted in consistent principles. It is a coherence of method. Control the mechanisms, define the framework, and the results will follow.

Once you see that, the Democrat double arguments aren’t really confusing anymore.

"Monday Music "Snoopy And the Red Baron" by The Royal Guardsmen

 

I heard this coming into work...and it prompted my "Monday Music", LOL, and Yes I have it on my "Funny Bones Favorite" Ronco Record, LOL

"Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" was inspired by the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz, which featured a recurring storyline of Snoopy imagining himself in the role of a World War I airman fighting the Red Baron. The song was released approximately one year after the first comic strip featuring Snoopy fighting the Red Baron appeared on Sunday October 10, 1965. Schulz and United Features Syndicate sued the Royal Guardsmen for using the name Snoopy without permission or an advertising license. (The Guardsmen, meanwhile, hedged their bets by recording an alternative version of the song, called "Squeaky vs. the Black Knight"; some copies of this version were issued by Laurie Records in Canada.) UFS won the suit, the penalty being that all publishing revenues from the song would go to them. Schulz did allow the group to write more Snoopy songs.
The song begins with a background commentary in faux German: "Achtung! Jetzt wir singen zusammen die Geschichte über den Schweinköpfigen Hund und den lieben Red Baron," which is a purposeful mistranslation of the English: "Attention! We will now sing together the story of that pig-headed dog Snoopy and the beloved Red Baron" and features the sound of a German sergeant ("eins, zwei, drei, vier" after the first verse), and an American sergeant (after the second verse) counting off in 4s; a fighter plane; machine guns; and a plane in a tailspin (at the end of the last verse). The song (1.46-1.54) quotes the instrumental chords from The McCoys' version of "Hang On Sloopy". In the original recording of "Snoopy", the lyrics "Hang on Snoopy, Snoopy hang on" were sung at this point. This led to some initial speculation that the Guardsmen were the McCoys under a different name. Prior to release, these lyrics were removed to prevent copyright issues.

"5 Hard Lessons from the Animal Farm Box Office Debacle"

 

I remember seeing this book in the late 70's in school and calling it "The Pig Book", shows what I know...couple of years later I had to read it for school and it was *dammmmm*  as a history nut even back them I could get the references and parallels if the history of animal farm and the history of the soviet Union.  I have a copy of that book i bought soo many years on a bookshelf in my bonus room.  Its funny that a socialist like George Orwall wrote a warning about communism.   

      I remembered seeing the previews for this movie and I had an interest in seeing it, but apparently it bombed pretty bad.

5 Hard Lessons from ‘Animal Farm’s’ Box Office Debacle

No one apparently wanted a re-imagined take on George Orwell classic

Christian Toto  Follow on TwitterSend an email5 days ago

 7,838 3 minutes read

Andy Serkis’ “Animal Farm” did the impossible.

The “new” take on the George Orwell classic alienated just about everyone, and it somehow united audiences in the process. The film proved too heady for kids but not meaty enough for their parents.

Few rallied to its side, even with its overt culture war implications.

Animal Farm | Andy Serkis | Official Trailer | In Theaters Now | Angel

Conservatives raged against it for discarding the source material’s attack on communism for an anti-capitalist bent. Liberal film critics weren’t pleased with it in general, giving the film a terrible 24 percent “rotten” rating.

The only people who liked it? Tucker Carlson and Riley Gaines, apparently.

The film earned a measly $3.4 million over the weekend. What went wrong? In a word, everything.

The title’s rollout should be a primer for how not to bring a film to the public. Here are some key takeaways from the debacle.

Stay In Your Lane

Angel Studios has done a remarkable job producing quality films on a budget. The shingle does so by telling stories that the majors won’t go near, often involving faith-driven plots or uplifting angles. It’s the anti-Hollywood, and it matters.

Think “Sound of Freedom,” “Cabrini” and “Bonhoeffer.”

An adaptation of “Animal Farm” is the perfect fit for the studio, assuming the film hews close to the source material. It didn’t. Now, even diehard Angel Studios admirers are crying foul.

Don’t Insult Your Fans

We’ve seen this story before. A woke company produced a woke dud, and the folks behind it attack the fans instead of taking responsibility for their woke handiwork. This often happens with geek-friendly content tied to “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who.”

“Bleep you, bigots!” It’s anti-PR at its worst.

Yet Angel Studios released a comedic short addressing the rancor tied to the project. Along the way, the clip gently attacks those who didn’t appreciate the film. (The studio apparently took down the clip in question)

That’s just dumb.

Editor’s Note: It’s a brutal time to be an independent journalist, but it’s never been more necessary given the sorry state of the corporate press. If you’re enjoying Hollywood in Toto, I hope you’ll consider leaving a coin (or two) in our Tip Jar.

Hollywood, Inc. Is Not Your Friend

Angel Studios roped in some high-caliber voice talent in acquiring “Animal Farm.” Woody Harrelson. Seth Rogen. Glenn Close. That might have been great for the company’s sense of self, but those stars aren’t aligned with the studio’s point of view.

Co-star Laverne Cox, a trans performer, used the film’s promotional circuit to promote trans issues. That’s all well and good for progressive Hollywood, but chances are the average Angel Studios fan wasn’t keen on hearing that argument.

Kids Don’t Want Income Inequality Screeds

Children love going to the movies, and PG-rated fare has helped Hollywood survive through some rough economic times. This year’s hit parade includes kid-friendly titles like “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Hoppers” and “GOAT.”

“Animal Farm,” with its $3 million opening weekend, won’t come near those films. Why? Children likely aren’t invested in income inequality riffs or laments about consumerism gone wild.

If It Ain’t Broke …

There’s nothing wrong with tweaking classic material. The modern James Bond would never swat a woman on the bottom a la old school 007. Changing it so much that it’s barely recognizable?That’s different.

We saw how audiences responded to the extreme “Snow White” makeover last year. We’re witnessing something similar play out here.