elonmusk

At What Price Free Speech?

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

It’s all over but the shouting.  Paperwork pending, Elon Musk has bought Twitter.

And, the shouting is all over the place but far from over.

It’s shaping up as a bad couple of weeks for the left side of ideology.  First, it was masks off.  Now, it’s Musk on.

Elon Musk used the platform he is buying to provide insight into what likely will be his guiding principle.  He tweeted, ” I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.”

But a lot (and we mean a lot) of “open-minded” citizens see it differently and came to Twitter and TV to tell us as much.  Even the ones that announced that they were packing their Tesla and moving to Canada if Donald Trump won had something to say.

Let’s start with the esteemed senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.  “This deal is dangerous for our democracy.  Billionaires like Musk play by a different set of rules than everyone else, accumulating power for their own gain.  We need a wealth tax and strong rules to hold big tech accountable.”

There is so much to unpack in that statement.  Was she speaking about herself?  If Elizabeth Warren identified as a man her pro(per) nouns would be Bernie and Sanders, but we digress.

News flash, free speech isn’t dangerous to our democracy.  See the very First Amendment for confirmation.

What some try to define as hate speech is indeed free speech.  You might hate what they say, but it’s their right to say it.  It’s just like burning an American flag.  You might hate seeing someone do so, but it’s been judicially ruled and subsequently upheld as freedom of expression.

Former Presidential Democratic “want to be” nominee Howard Dean tweeted that he was out.   Thousands commented back that they were as well.   The irony of using the platform to boldly announce that you’re leaving the platform is palpable.

None other than former VP Dan Quayle jumped in and tweeted, “at least seven people will miss you!”  Hateful.  True.  Quayle even spelled seven correctly!

Well, maybe the next stop for Dean is CNN+.  Come to think of it, it’s been a really bad run for those that lean left.

Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “The president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms, and has long argued that they must be held accountable for the harms that they cause.”  Likely he’s just been too busy to tackle this cause just yet.  After he fixes the harm caused by Russia and inflation though, lookout.

A study by The Center for Responsive Politics of political donations for the midterms by corporate employees, and published by Vox shows that 98.7% of the money donated went to the Democratic party from Twitter employees.

Want more?  Netflix 99.6%.  Apple 97.5%.  Google 96.0%.  Facebook 94.5%.  You can see why Biden is concerned, can’t you?

People who have preached that men can get pregnant are now concerned with misinformation on Twitter.  How timely?  How noble?

An African American who nearly single-handedly brought electric cars to the market to save the planet is now the bad guy for wanting free speech to truly be free.

Only in America could all of this happen concurrently.

After all, it’s the land of the “free” and the home of the “brave,” depending on whom you ask of course.

 

Basic Common Sense

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

A make-believe President Andrew Sheppard (actor Michael Douglas) interrupted a press conference in the movie An American President filmed in 1995 and said, “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” shrieked Beto O’Rourke to roaring applause from a crowd at Texas Southern University during a Democratic Debate for a want-to-be President in 2015. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.”

Yesterday, our real president, though some would argue in title only, Joe Biden told us that he wants to rein in the use of untraceable firearms known as ghost guns that turn up frequently at crime scenes.  This attempt targets privately made firearms that can be assembled from purchased do-it-yourself kits.  The weapons lack serial numbers, which makes it difficult to trace the owner.

Commercial manufacturers of the kits will have to be licensed and must add serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver.  Commercial sellers of the kits will have to become licensed and will be required to run background checks on potential buyers.  It makes some sense as conventional retailers must do the same.  It just won’t stop anyone who wants a gun to find a way to get one.

“These guns are weapons of choice for many criminals,” Biden said in a Rose Garden ceremony attended by victims and families of gun violence. “We are going to do everything we can to deprive them of that choice and, when we find them, put them in jail for a long, long time.”  Sounds like we’re not as interested in defunding the police as we were pre election.

Biden called the not call to arms “basic common sense.”  Except, it’s not.  Or, at least it’s not enough.

Well, it makes as much sense as Twitter employees who worry that Elon Musk, now Twitter’s largest shareholder, may turn their free speech platform into a platform that actually allows free speech, but we digress.

All together now- guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.

Adding serial numbers to parts will make illegal gun owners take a bit longer to file down the additional numbers to make them untraceable.  Also, stolen guns are stolen guns regardless of who cleared a background check originally.

There are over 330 million guns in this country that we can count. It’s the second amendment right.  If you don’t make another one, or file down another serial number, that’s enough for every man, woman, and child, regardless of their choice of pronouns, to pack heat.

Illinois and New York have the strictest gun control laws in the nation.  Ask the residents of Chicago’s south side or the Bronx how much that helps.

Criminal behavior starts way before someone puts a gun in their hand.  Once Veep Kamala figures out the root cause of illegal immigration maybe she can turn her attention to the root cause of criminal behavior.

Until then we can continue paying lip service to the problem as we do with China, Russia, inflation, debt, and the border.

 

Soon Enough, Hopefully.

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

When can’t get here soon enough.  Can it?

When will Joe Biden realize it’s 2022 and not 2020?  Will it be in 2024?

When will the Democratic Party begin the “thanks Joe for saving us from Trump, you were the right man at the right time to bring class and respect back to the Oval Office, and it’s, unfortunately, your choice to move on, but we respect your decision” campaign?  Will it be right after the 2022 midterms that he thinks are the 2020 midterms?

When will the press stop calling Joe’s incoherent thoughts, mumbles, memory loss, misstatements, and outright lies what they are, and not “gaffes?”  Will it be right after said midterms?

When will that same party realize that Kamala Harris is utterly unelectable on the national stage?   Will it be yesterday or sooner?

When will Team Hillary announce that she’s retained advisors looking into the feasibility of another run at the big job?  Will anyone care?

When will Team Michelle Obama announce that she has retained advisors to look into the feasibility for a first run at the big job?

When will the Republicans realize that Donald Trump is no longer electable on the big stage as well?

When will the RNC realize that the independent voters currently running/sprinting from Biden and his party will make a u-turn if Trump gets the nomination?

When will Nancy Pelosi retire?  Will it be after the 2022 midterms that Joe still thinks will take place in 2020?

When will CNN pivot back to the middle?  Will they realize the space is wide open?

When did Biden’s team decide to parade him out yesterday and call this the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” when Omicron is smashing right through the fully vaccinated and boosted as well?  Did the phrase poll well?

When will actually start following the science?

When will Fauci, the NIH, the CDC, and the WHO actually address treatments vs. harumphing the jab every damn day?

When will America collectively stop wearing worthless cloth masks on their face?

When will parents start influencing how schools are run vs. school officials dictating to America how they will be run?

When will America collectively stop yelling about who Twitter censures? When will they understand that Twitter is a public company that can do what it wants with content as long as the content isn’t technically theirs?

When will Elon Musk say enough and buy Twitter and Facebook, sorry Metaverse, with the loose change that he has under his sofa cushions?

When will NY say “enough already” and stop electing officials like newly-installed Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg who will not seek pre-trial detention or prison sentences for crimes other than homicide, public corruption, and a few other exceptional cases?

When will NY realize they hired a woman named AOC who actually has exhibited the brain capacity of a 13-year-old teenager from time to time?

When will this bowl season of 6-6 teams end?  Was it last night?

When will Nick Saban stop focusing on the process and retire?  Will it be a week after never?

When will this writer know when to say when?  Will it be right now, or should it have been a few sentences back?

 

 

Nine Piece Nuggets-Random

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

Inflation has hit BBR as well.  We contemplated a price increase but decided instead to cut the product back and maintain the price.

The quality is still here, but the quantity is one less.  Your beltline wins too!

  1.  Things aren’t all bad on the inflation front though.  The average price for a gallon of gas fell almost three cents in the last week.  That leaves it only 49% higher than a year ago, down from 50%.  The Biden team took a victory lap around the White House over the news.  Transitory we were once told.
  2.  A week before Jolly Old Saint Nick fires up the sleigh curmudgeon old Joe Biden had a sobering message for the unvaccinated: “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if you’re unvaccinated,” Biden said.  For themselves, their family, and the hospital they’ll soon overwhelm.”
  3. President James “Jimmy” Carter asked us to turn up our thermostats in the winter of the gas shortage of 1977.  Depressing.  That was a few years before his botched Iranian hostage rescue attempt went down in flames. Depressing.  The sky wasn’t falling then and it isn’t now in spite of Joe’s dire message.
  4. Speaking of speaking, botched, and Biden, yesterday’s presentation to Medal of Honor recipient Alwyn Cashe went wrong during a White House ceremony on Thursday.  For starters, Biden was 37 minutes late to the ceremony.  He then mispronounced Cashe’s name twice despite having a teleprompter in front of him.   Other than that Mrs. Cashe (who accepted the honor for her late husband) how was the rest of the play/ceremony?
  5. Biden’s verbal flub was not the only mistake in the ceremony.  As the narrator read Biden’s citation, he announced the Medal of Honor was being awarded to Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee as well, but “posthumously,” even though he was standing right next to the president.  Mark Twain chimed in and said, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
  6. The Twitter war between Elon Musk and Senator Elizabeth Warren was a doozie.  Elon landed several written jabs, but the haymaker was calling her Senator Karen.  You know it was great when MSNBC’s (no) Joy Reid had to throw in the towel.  She said that the “Karen” jab at Warren was “misappropriating black vernacular,” whatever the hell that means.  Reid is on the way out at MSNBC.  You can feel it.  We wonder how Karen would translate into Cherokee.
  7. Cops investigating the shooting death on the set of Rust got a search warrant for Alec Baldwin’s cell phone.  Baldwin appeared on ABC News George Stephanopoulos a couple of weeks back to explain that he didn’t shoot the gun that he was holding killing Halyna Hutchins.  Does that sound like the media coverage of the driver of the SUV  that didn’t run down and kill the Waukesha parade-goers, the SUV did.  One was very likely an accident, the other on purpose.  But still, let’s not kid ourselves.  Someone pulled a trigger.
  8. Dr. Peter McCullough, whose video we highly recommended last week, appeared on a Joe Rogan podcast this week.  It’s gone internet viral faster than the Omicron variant spread after Biden tightened the tests before international flights could come into America.  The good doctor said to Rogan,” There is no bigger public health crisis than the censorship in Covid -19.”
  9. Dr. Fauci says that we should require our holiday guests to show proof of vaccination before entering our homes.  Meanwhile, college and pro football stadiums are packed to capacity weekly since September.  Fauci reminds us of the Chevy Chase character in Vegas Vacation.  Ole Clark Griswold couldn’t win a bet in the casino guessing which hand, odd or even, nor heads or tails.
  10. Ok, ok, ok, we couldn’t help ourselves.   You’ll get ten after all.  Fired former Chris Cuomo producer John Griffin had all of his electronic devices seized by law enforcement 17 months ago.  This is CNN.  The FBI didn’t arrest him in the child trafficking heinous mess until 6 days ago.  They stormed Jeffery Epstein’s island quicker than that.  Barely.  This is the FBI.