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MISPLACED COMPASSION PUTS LIVES IN JEOPARDY
By John F. Di Leo, October 26, 2022

A common charge in western republics has been the claim that conservatives insist on thinking rationally and have no compassion, while liberals make all their decisions on feelings, and refuse to use their heads.

In the oft-misattributed aphorism, Winston Churchill first summed up this difference as: “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative by 40, you have no brain.”

Throughout the centuries-long struggle between constitutionally-limited government and a Marxist welfare state, this tug-of-war between heart and head -- between compassion and the rule of law -- has remained at the core of so many of our policy disagreements.

Should government insist on self-sufficiency, or issue welfare checks? Do we rely on the self-policing of the invisible hand of the free market, or do we micromanage every business with crippling regulations? Do we let a big business go under, or do we make future taxpayers bail it out?

The Left’s positions are always considered the “compassionate” ones. But are they really? Perhaps the wrong side is getting credit for caring. Perhaps it’s time the Right starts fighting this method of classification.

Case in point: The Methodist Hospital murders that took place in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday, October 22, 2022.

At about 11:15, a gunman beat up a hospital patient in the maternity ward and shot two hospital employees before being subdued and arrested.

The shooter, Nestor Hernandez, was there to visit his girlfriend, who had just given birth to his child.

Hernandez is a 30-year-old lifelong criminal with a rap sheet going back to his teens. He had been in and out of the Dallas criminal justice system for such charges as robbery and felony assault before he was twenty, and he earned his first serious jail time -- an eight-year sentence -- after a violent burglary in which he and his accomplice repeatedly beat up a woman to gain access to her apartment and car.

For that one, Nestor Hernandez pled guilty in September 2015 to “aggravated robbery,” which could have won him anywhere from five to 99 years in jail. They gave him eight.

Only they didn’t. If he’d served the full eight years, he’d still have been in jail. He wouldn’t have been free to acquire a girlfriend, get her pregnant, visit her at the hospital, beat her up, and kill two hospital employees.

So what happened? The system decided to show “compassion” to this model prisoner with a violent history, a rap sheet going back to his childhood, and gang tattoos on his face and neck. They didn’t even make him stay the full eight years but let him out of jail on October 20, 2021, after just six years. They installed an ankle bracelet and called it “parole.”

It was this choice that enabled him to put this girlfriend in a position where he could visit her hospital room and start killing innocent bystanders on October 22, just a year after he was freed.

In the end, we must ask, just who warrants compassion? To whom does a criminal justice system actually owe this complex concept of “compassion”?

There’s the criminal, there’s his known victim (in this case, the woman he beat up and robbed of $3000 worth of cash she’d been collecting for a school fundraiser), there’s his future intended victims, the people he is sure to target as soon as he’s released (like his current girlfriend), and there is the collateral damage that will result from his being precipitously set free, like the two hospital employees he killed in his Saturday morning rampage.

Which of these parties occupied the minds of the district attorney’s office when they set up that plea deal in 2015, saving the cost and trouble of a trial, but clearly giving him too short a prison sentence as a result?

And which of these parties occupied the minds of the parole board when they set him free two years earlier than necessary, deluding themselves that an ankle bracelet might protect the public from this thug as well as a concrete and steel cell had done thus far?

Upon consideration, we see that it’s neither a shortage nor a surfeit of compassion that drives the wrong choices here. There’s actually plenty of compassion on the sides of both the advocates and opponents of tough sentencing.

The difference between them is which parties should be the focus of that compassion.

For half a century or more, the American Left has focused and aimed compassion at the criminal, no matter how guilty, how violent, how recidivist, how monstrous, how dangerous to society.

And all this time, the American Right has focused its compassion on all the rest of the parties -- the law-abiding citizenry whom the criminal justice system was established to protect.

The American Right has compassion that is aimed at the deserving parties. The Right has compassion for the victim of that first crime, who deserves justice. The Right has compassion for the future victims, the girlfriends or acquaintances or marks whom this thug will someday attack if set free again. And the Right has compassion for the future bystanders, in this case the hardworking hospital employees who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time… a moment when this violent demon, set free by a foolish, misguided bureaucracy, might choose to go on a shooting spree.

Whose compassion makes sense to society -- those who care most for the happiness of the predator, or those who care most for the safety of the innocent victims upon whom he is sure to prey as long as he breathes free?

If this were a rare occurrence, we couldn’t draw these clear conclusions, but it’s not rare. This same story happens every day in our major metropolitan areas, in Texas and Illinois, in Los Angeles and New York, from coast to coast.

We catch the criminals, we convict them, we give them sentences that are too short, we let them out before their sentences are served… And they commit more crimes, and eventually we catch and convict them again -- perhaps once for every five or ten crimes -- and the cycle repeats.

The details may differ, but the story is the same: the system shows compassion to a proven criminal, instead of showing compassion to his past and future victims. The system thus endangers the neighborhoods, the workplaces, the entertainment venues, the housing complexes, the parks and playgrounds, every single place that society needs to function safely.

The system thus endangers the law-abiding American public, because such misplaced compassion puts human lives in jeopardy, by the millions, every day.

It’s election time, and this crime wave is on everyone’s mind. Voters, too, are known to be motivated by compassion. So the question is: Will the voters’ compassion be in sync with the public interest this time?

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

IF REPUBLICANS WIN, IT'S THE END OF DEMOCRACY
By M.B. Mathews, October 28, 2022

We should hope so. Democracy is mob rule. Democracy is rule by majority. We do not have a direct democracy. We never had one. America was never set up for that. We have a representative republic, where the representatives we voters choose make the decisions as to what legislation to approve or disapprove, according to what we want. That necessitates that our representatives actually ask us now and then what we want instead of voting how they want without our input. Elementary civics lesson over.

Hillary Clinton derided Republicans in a keynote address during the New York Democrat party convention in February: "the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection," and it "let Donald Trump trash our democracy."

She is lying, as always. We don't "officially embrace violent insurrection." We don't embrace it all, but Democrats do. When they send Kamala Harris to the cameras so she can encourage violence in the cities, they embrace violent insurrection. She claims she was talking about protesting, not violence, but all the protests were violent.

When Democrats tell protesters they can harass SCOTUS justices, they are the ones embracing violence.

Maxine Waters wants Democrats to "get in their faces" at restaurants.

Nice try at projection.

Democrats use violence all the time, whereas you would be hard pressed to find incidents of violence by Republicans. Democrats are so anxious to paint Republicans with violence that they will even send their own in, dressed in MAGA clothes and hats, to provoke where no provocation existed before they got there.

Republicans, as a rule, just don't do violence. January 6 was not violent until agitators came in to see if they could find a way to get protesters to skid out of control. It worked, and Republicans got the blame.

Last Thursday, Hillary said, "If I were a betting person, I'd say Trump is going to run again. ... If he's not held accountable and he gets to do it again, I think that could be the end of our democracy."

No — the first thing newly elected Republicans will do, probably right after reopening the Keystone pipeline and closing the border, will be to restore freedom and liberty to all the conservatives who were silenced, jailed, harassed, and closed down by Democrats.

It is the Democrats alone who censor, dox, cancel, and destroy. It's their agenda to silence conservatives by any means necessary.

Without even going into how Democrats destroyed our military, our schools, entertainment, the economy, small businesses, and everything else they touched, this November will be as important as 2024. If Trump runs, he will win. If DeSantis runs, he will win, even against Gruesome Newsom, who never met a dollar he didn't love so long as he could take it from someone else, and who cannot wait to rope in the entire population of California and feed them bugs, make them ride bicycles and E.V.s, and shut down their shops. Freedom is his enemy. Freedom is the enemy of all authoritarians, and you will find authoritarians only among Democrats, not Republicans.

If you want a resuscitated America in November, you must vote for representatives who will:

1. Open oil pipelines.
   Close the borders.
   Educate in our schools and remove drag queens and anti-white racist teachers.
   Secure elections by going back to paper ballots and one-day voting.
   Resuscitate the military as a fighting force, not a social experiment.
   Remove every vestige of CRT, SEL, DEI, ESG in government agencies.
   Clean out the FBI, CIA, FCC, NEA, IRS, and the EPA and strip them of all but the most innocuous powers. Better still, eliminate these agencies.
   Stop spending and printing money.
   Stop paying people not to work.
   Bar men in women's sports.
   Revoke Section 230 and make websites like Twitter and Facebook legally responsible for their unrepentant censorship against conservatives.

This is a no-excuses election. Everyone must vote. We have the choice in a few days to either keep a free America or acquiesce to the Great Resetters who want a one-party system.

If you want more of what we've been getting the last two years, vote Democrat. If you want your freedom back and want to stop self-censoring, vote Republican. First, we take control of Congress. Then we take the White House back. Perhaps then our representative republic can function as intended once again.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

WE'RE GETTING PLAYED WHEN IT COMES TO WHO'S THE REAL 2022 WINNER
By Andrea Widburg, November 14, 2022

Following the dismal midterm showing, there’s a lot of blame to go around. While I can and will sum up the issue, I want to focus more narrowly on the way in which the entire Republican machine is turning from Trump, who is now anathema, to Ron DeSantis, who is the new god. Considering that we still have a long time before the primaries and then the 2024 election, this kind of decision-making is premature and dangerous—and that’s why we’re being forced into it.

Here's a short list of leading blame topics: (1) The GOP was useless; (2) American voters (especially the young ones), after 60 years of non-stop propaganda in the media, entertainment, and schools, no longer value freedom and the Constitution; (3) brainwashed women voters believe that fulfillment lies in a career and an appointment with the abortionist; and (4) Trump anointed weak candidates in pivotal elections.

Oh, and here’s what I believe is the most significant factor: mail-in ballots. In states with mail-in ballots, the Secretary of State mails ballots to every person on the registrar’s list. It’s irrelevant that many have moved, are dead, or are manifestly fraudulent (see all of Jay Valentine’s articles on the subject). At apartment buildings, you may see dozens of ballots sitting in piles in the lobby, addressed to people who long since moved away.

The ballots then get mailed back in again. The Secretary of State has no idea who filled out the ballots or popped them in the mailbox. He or she doesn’t care that 1,000 are returned from the same 30-unit apartment building or temporary homeless shelter. The ballots are then taken from their envelopes, effectively removing all identification, and “counted.”

This is a process without any brakes on fraud. And if the current crop of ballots doesn’t provide a victory for the Democrats, it’s perfectly easy to slip in a few more ballots that are untethered to a real person to tip the “correct” candidate into the winning pile.

Shenanigans with computers, ballot harvesting, and traditional voter fraud are also useful for gaming the vote. All in all, our system would have made Boss Tweed proud back in the heyday of Tammany Hall's corruption in old New York.
But whether the vote fraud that is now woven into our system ever gets straightened out (and if Democrats control both houses, it won’t) is a matter for another post. What I want to talk about is the sustained attack on Donald Trump, along with Ron DeSantis’s simultaneous elevation to political sainthood.

Both candidates have tremendous strengths and some weaknesses. I would happily vote for either if he were at the top of the ticket. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s a matter to be considered in a few months, when the primaries heat up. Yes, Trump sent out intemperate tweets, but that’s because he’s under sustained attack and he’s a counterpuncher…and it’s that attack that I want to talk about and warn you against.

I do not believe the attack against Trump is organic. That is, it’s not because the same voters who turned up enthusiastically at his rallies have suddenly decided he’s soiled. Indeed, aside from Oz in Pennsylvania, Trump mostly had an excellent track record. People still resonate to Trump, and that still helps candidates.

However, the entire GOP has swung against Trump. For example, the editorial board at the New York Post (a paper I consider mostly excellent), announced “Don’t believe Trump — this midterm miss is all because of him.” Wow! That’s harsh, but it’s also consistent with what we’re seeing all over the Republican side of the aisle.

At the same time, we’re told that DeSantis is the new savior. Indeed, that very enthusiasm for DeSantis has die-hard Trump supporters believing that DeSantis is nothing but a Trojan RINO—and that’s even though DeSantis was one of the original freedom caucus members. Sundance, who is always an interesting read, routinely writes about this concern.

However, it’s just as likely that DeSantis’s support from the GOP crowd has very little to do with him and everything to do with the GOP/NeverTrump determination to destroy the man who threatened to upset the Republican establishment’s cozy relationship with Democrats in D.C.: All of the perks and money; none of the responsibility for governing.

If I’m correct, the moment the GOP/NeverTrump team manages to take out Trump, it will turn on DeSantis as well. Given DeSantis’s focus on freedom, he’s just as dangerous to the establishment as Trump was. If we conservatives aren’t careful, the RINO/NeverTrumps will play us so well that all of the conservatives are knocked out in the primaries, and we end up with Evan McMullin at the top of the 2024 Republican ticket.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

COUNTY NEWS

On November 22, 2022, the Iosco County Precinct Delegates met to elect the members of the Executive Board.  These are a one-to-one match for the At-Large members who ran for elected office.  The At-Large Members are

Michele Hoitenga, Mike Hoadley, Nancy Huebel, Erica Earl, Cathy Anderson, Jim Bacarella, Scott Frank, Robert Huebel, Terry Dutcher, Charles Finley, Brain Loeffler and Donald Jay O'Farrell.  The elected members are David Chandler (Chair), Linda Glomski (Vice Chair), Deborah Sutton (Secretary), Maureen Rudel (Treasurer), Marlene and Patrick Haggerty, Roxanne Rosenfeld, Joshua Sutton, Jane Hayward, Earl Lackie, Kandi Steinley and Karl Mayer.

We elevated Ryan Richardson to fill the vacancy for precinct delegate in Plainfield 1 and for the vacancies in Oscoda 2, we elevated Paul Rekowski and Jeremy Spencer.  This is the first time in my service as Treasurer (starting in 1996) that we have filled every single precinct delegate slot.