Chris Bablin

[Allen Mashburn @RealMashburn4NC]

The Electoral College was basically a compromise. The Founders wanted the president chosen with the people’s support, but they didn’t want a straight national popular vote or to just hand the decision to Congress.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, they talked for months about how to pick a president. A direct popular vote worried them. Bigger states would almost always win. A lot of voters wouldn’t really know candidates from other parts of the country. And someone who was just good at stirring people up in one area could end up winning.

Letting Congress pick the president worried them even more. The president would end up depending on Congress, which goes against the idea of keeping the branches separate. It also opened the door to backroom deals, corruption, or other countries trying to influence the choice.

So they settled on the Electoral College. Each state gets electors equal to its number of House seats plus its two senators. Those electors cast the actual votes for president. You need a majority to win. If no one gets it, the House decides, and each state gets one vote. The states get to decide how they pick their electors.

This setup treated the country as a union of states instead of one giant population. It gave smaller states more of a voice, kept the president from being controlled by Congress, and still let the people’s choice matter.

Alexander Hamilton explained it in Federalist 68. He said the people’s voice still counts because they choose the electors. The electors would be people who could actually study the candidates and make a careful choice. Meeting in their own states (instead of all in one place) would make it harder for chaos, bribery, or foreign influence to take over. And the president would still depend on the people, not Congress, to stay in office.

Hamilton also pointed out that being good at “the little arts of popularity” might get someone ahead in one state, but it would take real ability and character to win the confidence of the whole country. He thought the system made it very likely only someone highly qualified would end up as president.

That’s the idea they were going for: a capable president with support across the country, protection for smaller states, and an executive that stayed independent. Things changed later with political parties and the winner-take-all system most states use now, but the basic structure is still what the Constitution set up.

The Electoral College must be protected at all costs— it’s common sense in a country filled with lunatics.

[Baby News Network @BabyNetworkNews]

VETO Day At The White House 🔨😂

[Handre @Handre]

The men who wrote the Constitution owned guns, distrusted bankers, and believed taxation without consent was worth dying over. They would not recognize the country operating under their name today.

Federal spending crossed $7 trillion per year. The income tax, which the founders explicitly rejected, now reaches into every paycheck you earn before you touch a dollar of it. The Federal Reserve, a central bank of the exact type Jefferson warned would strip citizens of property through inflation, has spent the last two decades aggressively expanding the money supply and handing you the bill through rising prices.

The founders drew the federal government's powers in a short, specific list. Congress could coin money, raise an army, and regulate interstate trade. What it could not do is not in that list, because the founders assumed the limits were obvious. They were wrong to assume that.

Today the federal government licenses your profession, subsidizes your competitor, dictates your health plan, and surveils your financial transactions above $600. The administrative state, staffed by unelected bureaucrats at the FDA, SEC, EPA, and an estimated 430 other agencies, writes rules carrying the force of law without a single congressional vote. Madison called this precise arrangement tyranny in The Federalist Papers(No. 47).

The founders risked hanging to escape a government that taxed tea at 3%. You hand over 30 percent of your income and are supposed to thank the state for the privilege of keeping the rest.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Capitalism is perhaps the most misunderstood economic system in history, largely because it is routinely blamed for the consequences of violating its own principles.

Capitalism means private property, individual rights, voluntary trade, and a government limited to protecting those rights. It is a system in which individuals are free to produce, compete, trade, and prosper without requiring political permission or favoritism.

Cronyism, by contrast, means government granting economic privileges through subsidies, bailouts, tariffs, regulations designed to protect favored businesses, and other forms of political favoritism.

Socialism, communism, fascism, theocracy, absolute monarchy, feudalism, mercantilism, corporatism, and cronyism differ in their doctrines, methods, and objectives. Yet all have permitted political authority or privileged groups to override individual economic freedom.

The fundamental distinction is between voluntary exchange and political coercion.

Under capitalism, economic success depends on creating value that others voluntarily choose to purchase. Under cronyism, political influence can substitute for earning that success through trade.

This brings us to the mixed economy, where elements of capitalism coexist with government intervention, redistribution, regulation, and political favoritism.

When intervention produces unintended consequences, critics routinely attribute those failures to capitalism simply because they occurred in an economy containing private businesses and markets.

That is a fundamental error of causation.

The existence of private businesses does not make every government policy capitalist. Nor does the existence of wealthy businessmen make political favoritism a product of free markets.

A businessman who earns a fortune through voluntary trade and one who obtains privileges through political coercion are operating on fundamentally different principles.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism has never been fully implemented. Yet to the extent economic freedom has existed, it has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to create wealth, increase productivity, encourage innovation, and raise living standards.

And here lies the great irony.

The remaining economic freedom continues to generate much of the wealth that makes government intervention and redistribution possible, while helping cushion society against their destructive consequences.

Critics then demand further intervention to remedy problems caused or aggravated by previous interventions, perpetuating a cycle in which political power expands while capitalism receives the blame.

Before blaming capitalism for any economic problem, establish whether that problem arose from voluntary exchange or the coercive exercise of political power.

You cannot reasonably condemn a system for the consequences of violating its principles while ignoring the benefits produced when those principles are respected.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

Jenner Welch and Angie Sullivan, this is repulsive. Regardless of anyone’s political position, the mirth you express about the brutal murder of another human being is repugnant. It is a disgusting display of a complete lack of empathy, respect for human life, compassion, maturity, and personal morals. There is no personal standard being upheld by either of you. @Hanover_Square Press, @YouTube @ApplePodcasts

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@BobLonsberry Bob do us all a favor and please stop tweeting 😱 JUST STOP ALREADY

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@BobLonsberry Bob I have been a loyal WGY listener for many years but this is the reason I can’t listen to you in the morning anymore. You are all over the map. You actually think democrats are better stewards of the constitution? Did you take a nap during Trumps first term?

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@Daily_Chiefs_ Not true at all

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@MahomeSZN Terrible nasty take. Butker is NOT the reason we lost this game

[Lee Zeldin @LeeMZeldin]

The ease at which Hochul lies here is wild.

New York BANNED natural gas extraction, won’t allow gas hookups to new construction, CLOSED Indian Point nuclear site, is BLOCKING Constitution Pipeline, set expensive climate goals Albany politicians know can’t be reached, and has electric rates MASSIVELY above national average.
https://t.co/S4pYPlgXrI

[LeoTerrell @TheLeoTerrell]

I want all of my followers to retweet this message every day until election day! Thank you!

[Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 @RobSchneider]

My fellow Americans,

Something broke in the Democratic Party.
Their love of country has gone missing.

Giving other people basic human dignity seems no longer necessary to them.
What is right and wrong now depends on who has committed the wrong and why?

Reason has given way to rage. Persuasion has been discarded for violent rhetoric and actual violence.

Fraud, theft and voting irregularities and illegal voting now seem acceptable to them. Even justified.

Leftists have more sympathy for criminals than for the victims of their crime.

Their empathy for their fellow Americans must only be given to those with the same political beliefs.

This unique American system of government with its checks and balances that has provided the greatest level of freedom and prosperity the world has ever known, they feel is now dispensable.

What they offer to replace it is a socialist nightmare that has been responsible for the deaths of over 100,000,000 people in the 20th century.

Perhaps even worse, the Left now flirt with the dangerous and Western Civilization enemy, Islam, which is completely incompatible with American freedoms, our constitution, women rights and gay rights, religious freedoms and free speech.

An actual Hamas terrorist supporter, supported by the designated terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is running to be the next Senator of Michigan and may very well win.

I remind my fellow Americans that our freedoms are inalienable and given by God and were fought and died for by patriots with their own blood.

While the Republican Party is far from perfect, they will keep our borders closed from people who intend to harm our fellow citizens. Unlike Democrats, they will continue to protect our God given liberties and our Constitution and our system of justice and government.

So I beseech you to do your duty and vote like your life, and your children’s life and freedoms depend on it.

Because they do.

God bless you and your family and God bless the United States of America! 🇺🇸

Love,
Rob Schneider

[I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 @ImMeme0]

Kathy Hochul is crying over an immigrant father who was going to Home Depot when police picked him up and put him in a detention center but she didn’t shed a single tear when an illegal alien stabbed two immigrant women to death in New York.

Bruce Blakeman: “We have an epidemic of crime from these illegal migrants. There are 16,000 detainers out there for people who committed 52,000 crimes in our state, and you won’t let local law enforcement cooperate with ICE to pick them up and get them out of this state. This never would have happened, Kathy, if it weren’t for your policies.”

One man heading to a hardware store fits the story she wants to tell. Two women butchered by someone who never should have been here don’t. So one gets the outrage and the press, while the other gets ignored. And thousands of foreign criminals roaming New York’s streets get swept under the rug.

That’s not compassion. It’s pure hypocrisy. Immigrants only matter to her when they prop up the narrative. never when they’re the victims of the policies she defends.

[NFL Rumors @nflrums]

🚨 Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker said gun control is not the solution to "degenerate violence" and that the focus should instead be on promoting fathers and positive male role models:

"I don't think g*ns are the issue. I think we need strong fathers in the home that are being great examples."

Via FOX4KC.

#NFL #KansasCity #Chiefs

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Now that the 11 jurors who voted not guilty have spoken publicly I have even more respect for the lone male hero juror who refused to vote not guilty despite six days of hectoring from these awful left wing women. He’s a hero. God bless him.

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@nytimes Did anyone at @nytimes ever ask her to define what a woman is?

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.

She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.

The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.

She handed out the checks herself.

In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college.

When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months.

You've probably heard that part.

Here's the part you haven't:

The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top.

Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave.

She built her county an entire hospital.

She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it.

In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees.

Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal.

In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release.

And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it.

She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway.

She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did.

Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸

[David Limbaugh @DavidLimbaugh]

I confess I hate being barraged by emails and I rarely read those emails from people who always send articles and that type of thing but for some reason I read one today and I thought it really interesting so I’m going to paste it here. You may have seen it before, but I haven’t.

Conundrum

Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free. (Think this one over and over…makes sense!)

"A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one, you'll probably never need one again."

The definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.

Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America :

1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

Think about it! And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century. Makes you wonder who is doing the math.

[Chris Bablin @chris_bablin]

@BurrowsMMA @JeffVeillette I have to ask what is the worst song on Revolver? It is my favorite Beatles album btw

[Jonathan Cohler @cohler]

FOR THE WILDFIRE CRAZY AND
CLIMATE MENTALLY DERANGED

The last 150 years is the greatest improvement in the human condition in the entire history of our species. It is not close.

Fire is down.

US burned area peaked at 52 million acres in 1930. It runs 5 to 10 million now. An 80 percent collapse. Global burned area, measured by satellite since the late 1990s, is down 25 percent.

Africa’s savannas, which used to dominate the global burn, have gone quiet as agriculture replaced fire-prone scrub.
The planet is greening.

Satellite data shows a leaf area increase equivalent to adding one entire Amazon rainforest to the Earth since 2000. Zhu et al. attributed 70 percent of the greening to CO2 fertilization. Deserts are shrinking at their edges. The Sahel is greener than it was 40 years ago.

Crops are exploding.

Global grain production has more than tripled since 1961 on roughly the same acreage. Yield per hectare on wheat, maize, and rice has quadrupled. Famine deaths per capita have fallen by roughly 99 percent since the 1870s.

People live twice as long.

Global life expectancy in 1875 was about 30 years. Today it is 73. More than doubled. In the developed world it went from 40 to over 80. Doubled again.

Children stop dying.

In 1800, 43 percent of children died before age 5. Today it is under 4 percent globally, under 1 percent in the developed world. A tenfold reduction. An order of magnitude.

Poverty collapsed.

In 1820, roughly 90 percent of humans lived in extreme poverty. Today it is under 9 percent, and falling. Another order of magnitude, while the global population grew from 1 billion to 8 billion. More people, vastly less poverty, per capita and in absolute terms.

Everyone can read.

Global literacy in 1875 was around 20 percent. Today it is 87 percent. Four times higher across a population that grew six times larger.

Everyone got rich.

Real GDP per capita globally (Maddison data, constant dollars) went from about $1,200 in 1870 to over $16,000 today. Roughly a fourteenfold increase. In the developed world, more like fiftyfold.

Weather stopped killing people.

Deaths from climate and weather related disasters peaked in the 1920s and 1930s at around 5 million per year, mostly drought and flood in Asia. Today, with five times the global population, it runs under 20,000 per year. A per capita reduction of over 99 percent. Two full orders of magnitude.

Work got easier.

Average annual working hours in developed economies fell from around 3,000 in 1870 to about 1,700 today. Roughly half. Child labor collapsed. Leisure exploded.

The cause is not a mystery.

Fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas turned muscle labor into machine labor. They powered fertilizer production (Haber-Bosch alone feeds roughly half the humans alive). They powered refrigeration, sanitation, hospitals, tractors, transport, and every step of the industrial food chain. Cheap dense energy is what dragged our species out of the Malthusian trap where it had lived for 10,000 years.

And the byproduct of that cheap dense energy, CO2, is the same molecule that is regreening the Earth and boosting crop yields on top of the mechanical gains.

Every actual measurement of the human condition and the biosphere shows the same thing.

Fires down. Green up. Lifespans up. Child deaths down. Poverty down. Hunger down. Wealth up. Literacy up. Weather deaths down. All by factors of 2 to 100 in a century and a half.

The industrial civilization the alarmists want to dismantle is the single largest engine of human and ecological improvement ever recorded. The data are not ambiguous. They are not close.

They are not debatable.

They are simply denied.
By the mentally ill.