Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, Whores and Ale, The Daley Gator and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!

Issues & Insights thinks the day of reckoning may be coming for the Bidens.  I’m not so sure.  Excerpt:

One exception to the media blackout was a lengthy Washington Post investigation of the Bidens last March that was quickly buried by the rest of the media. Its findings were nothing short of damning:

While many aspects of Hunter Biden’s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.

Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden …

The new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service …

The contract, signed on Aug. 2, 2017, stated that Hunter Biden would get a one-time retainer of $500,000 and would then receive a monthly stipend of $100,000, with his uncle James Biden getting $65,000 a month …

The potential energy projects Hunter Biden discussed with CEFC never came to fruition.

And, of course, Biden was the “Big Guy,” who got a piece of all these deals for being, well, Joe Biden, former vice president and possible future president.

There’s a lot more where that came from; read the whole thing.  But consider this closing statement:

The coming congressional hearings on the Hunter Biden laptop revelations should be an eye-opener for even politically jaded Americans. We think they’ll soon agree: Joe Biden deserves to be impeached for putting his White House influence up for sale to the highest foreign bidder.

Yeah, he deserves it.  The amount of influence-peddling and outright corruption by the Bidens is damn near Clintonesque levels.  But as far as any consequences, much less appropriate ones, like impeachment, conviction and removal?  Color me skeptical.

I do think the timing of all this – especially the appointment of a special counsel – looks suspiciously like the deep state is trying to edge the Big Guy towards the exit, and to be honest, I can see why this could be the case.  President Biden’s mental disintegration is accelerating, and whatever drug cocktail they were using to make him (barely) coherent enough to read off of a teleprompter for fifteen minutes doesn’t seem to be working very well any more.

But the Big Guy, for all his infusions of 10% of whatever graft his family was able to scrounge, has the best Get Out of Jail Free card ever invented; a “D” behind his name.  Oh, he may be edged out of office, just in time to theoretically allow the execrable Heels-Up Harris to not only succeed him but run for two full terms on her own right – a task in which I predict she will fail miserably.  But his retirement from politics will be comfortably wealthy, for him and his family.

As America’s Songwriter once wrote, “steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.”  That’s what’s in play here now.  That’s why none of the Bidens will suffer any real consequences for their decades of corruption.  And that’s one of the reasons I maintain, as I have for years, that the principle of equal treatment under the law is dead in this nation, and has been for some time.

Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Whores and Ale, Bacon Time, Pirate’s Cove and The Daley Gator for the Rule Five links!

So, late Friday night, Kevin McCarthy was finally elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  I have some thoughts.  Here are the deals he agreed to to put him over the top:

McCarthy reportedly agreed to major concessions, convincing the holdouts to support him. “I think we hammered out a historic agreement that’s going to change the way Washington does business,” Harris told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

Concessions reportedly include:

• A single member can move to “vacate the chair”
• A hard line on the debt limit
• Votes on term limits and border security
• McCarthy’s leadership PAC will stay out of open primaries
• “Open rules” on spending measures, and the ability to bring up stand-alone appropriation bills
• Discretionary spending cap
• A commitment to set up a committee on the “weaponization” of the government

One thing I don’t see there is a requirement to allow reading time for bills; I would prefer to see six weeks but seventy-two hours is the time I’ve seen kicked around.  We’ve seen too much damage from Congress passing bills that none of the members have read.

As for the vote on term limits; I’d have to look it up but I’m pretty sure there have been court rulings that term limits for Congress would require amending the Constitution.

And a “committee on the weaponization of the government?”  What will that accomplish?  When was the last time any such committee resulted in any actual charges or convictions?  They may accomplish something with hearings; everyone with enough brains to pound sand knows that there have been manifold abuses of power on the part of the FBI alone, more than sufficient to land people in the pokey.  But I’m skeptical that anything will be done about it; in the end, it will all slide.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849, wrote,  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Kevin McCarthy is a creature of the Swamp, and I’m guessing not much in the Swamp will change.

We’ll see what happens now, with a (barely) Republican House and a Republican Speaker.  But my guess is that it will be more or less business as usual.

Before we get into this, check out my latest over at Glibertarians.  And if you’re not perusing the morning and evening links posts (and all the other great content) over there, you should be!

Now then:  The 2020 census has yielded some interesting, although not surprising, results.  Excerpt:

According to a press release, Texas was the largest-gaining state in the U.S., surpassing the 30 million population mark due to net domestic migration, net international migration, and natural increase. Meanwhile, Florida’s 1.9 percent population increase made it the fastest-growing state in the nation.  

In terms of population decline, Census Bureau data show 18 states experienced a decline, with California topping the list. The single biggest factor in this population decline was because of “domestic outmigration.”

Increasing by 470,708 people since July 2021, Texas was the largest-gaining state in the nation, reaching a total population of 30,029,572. By crossing the 30-million-population threshold this past year, Texas joins California as the only states with a resident population above 30 million. Growth in Texas last year was fueled by gains from all three components: net domestic migration (230,961), net international migration (118,614), and natural increase (118,159).

Florida was the fastest-growing state in 2022, with an annual population increase of 1.9%, resulting in a total resident population of 22,244,823.

“While Florida has often been among the largest-gaining states,” Wilder noted, “this was the first time since 1957 that Florida has been the state with the largest percent increase in population.”

Here’s the onion:

Eighteen states experienced a population decline in 2022, compared to 15 and DC the prior year. California, with a population of 39,029,342, and Illinois, with a population of 12,582,032, also had six-figure decreases in resident population. Both states’ declining populations were largely due to net domestic outmigration, totaling 343,230 and 141,656, respectively.

Ask yourselves – what do those two states have in common?

People voting with their feet is nothing new, of course.  And I’m sure a fair number of the folks leaving Illinois and California are right-of-center people who are, essentially, political migrants.  Mrs. Animal’s and my move to Alaska was in part (granted a very small part) due to this.

Prediction:  We’ll see more of this as time goes on.  This outmigration from blue states, of course, isn’t all right-of-center folks looking for a friendlier political environment.  A certain percentage of it is people with leftist proclivities who will immediately start voting to remake their new homes in the model of their old, never minding that it was the governing policies of the states they fled that made things bad enough to encourage the move.

It will, of course, all come down to percentages between the two groups.  But so far, it isn’t looking good; Arizona is now a purple state, my old stomping grounds of Colorado have gone reliably blue, and even here in the Great Land, Anchorage is a Democrat stronghold.

Where this will all end is anyone’s guess.