Is the Bill of Rights to the Constitution still relevant?

It's time to pick on the Republicans for a change and I'm going to keep this short and simple. For about forty years we've been allowing people to enter the country illegally. Or maybe some of them entered legally with some sort of visa or other temporary status that I'm not even aware of and then they decided they liked it here and stayed. Apparently nobody checks the status of people here on a temporary visa status. Then there's a visa status that I didn't know about until about three months ago. It's called permanent resident status and it's a visa that allows the recipient of the card to live and work in the country for as long as they want but they aren't allowed to vote in elections. There is no requirement to become a citizen they just have to obey the law and renew the visa every ten years. I don't know why a person would want to live their whole life in a country without becoming a citizen, but I'm sure there are valid reasons. And I don't really care, but it turns out that the people in charge of passing out visas don't have a limit on the number of visas that can be issued nor does anyone ever follow up to ensure that people are renewing their visas on time, or ever. It's basically an honor system.

Honor systems work fine when you're working with honest people, but even honest people can get lazy and ten years is a pretty long time so time passes and the damn thing doesn't get renewed on time. Over time visa holders and even bureaucrats get kind of lax since there's no penalty for not renewing the visa and no real incentive to renew it at all. It can be hard for a person with an expired visa to renew a driver's license and if a permanent resident card holder leaves the country and has an expired visa they can't reenter. An individual can remain in the country indefinitely as long as they don't get caught breaking the law or otherwise draw attention to themselves so for decades no one really noticed. Then there were a few high profile crimes committed by people in the country illegally and some people became concerned. Then of course there was the tragic attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Many of the terrorists involved on that were in the country with expired visas, mostly student visas. They decided to hijack four jumbo jets with passengers on board and use them to complete a suicide mission; two of them flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, collapsing them both. A third flew into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and a forth apparently got lost, but was probably supposed to fly into the United States Capitol building. The passengers overpowered the terrorist hijackers and deliberately crashed the plane into a farmers field in Pennsylvania. What I'm trying to say is that the visa system was a little lax but it wasn't a problem until it was. 

There has been near hysteria in the country ever since. Every time an individual in the country illegally committed a murder or a rape it made the news and it seemed to be happening more and more often. Finally a guy decided he'd had enough and he ran for president of the United States almost solely on the platform of deporting people here illegally. The logic was sound; if the murderers and rapists weren't here they wouldn't be committing violent crimes. Drunk driving is another favorite crime committed by illegal aliens and drunk drivers kill and maim lots of people. The man's name was Donald Trump and he had been a celebrity for a long time. He was a real estate mogul who had made billions of dollars and decided he could help the country as president. He ran a good campaign and won the election by a large margin. Democrats hated him and kept him busy for his entire term by trying three times to impeach him without ever presenting any impeachable offenses. In addition to that they charged him with multiple crimes that were never committed, but he still had to waste time defending himself in court. 

He was an unconventional president in that he was sending out emails daily defending himself publicly and disparaging his accusers. Some people thought he was probably right, but he was mean so when his term ended in 2020 he was defeated by an old man who was clearly suffering from dementia. His four year term was a near disaster. When he left office hardly anyone in the country could afford to buy a house because interest rates had shot up dramatically. There was a war raging in the Middle East and the Russians had started a war with neighboring Ukraine. So Donald Trump ran again and won by a large margin again and pretty much used the same platform; deport people here illegally especially those who were committing crimes. Of course he also promised to help get the economy moving again and to help stop the wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. 

This is where my concerns about the Bill of Rights comes in. He was extremely serious about deportations. He unleashed the Department of Homeland Security and told them to deport every single person in the country illegally. Visa checks, work places, prisons he wanted to know where every visa holder was and if their visas had expired or not. If they had he wanted them deported and that's where he lost me. There is a requirement to renew a visa, but no one ever checks and there's no penalty for non compliance. The violator can be deported, but there is no requirement to deport them. To the Trump administration that didn't matter. All violators had to be investigated and the majority of them had to leave. Many of them had been here for thirty years or more and never committed a crime. They had good jobs and owned houses, their kids went to school here and they just didn't see any reason to keep renewing a visa when there was no penalty for not doing it. Well now it's a problem. The Department of Homeland Security has been going after all of them. Moms, dads, kids, everyone. 

To make things worse they are allowing officers from the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs enforcement run around with no uniforms, blue jeans and whatever t-shirt they want to wear and to top it off they are allowed to wrap their heads in a rag so no one can tell who they are. They claim they have to do that so criminals won't know who they are and track them down and kill them. All members of law enforcement face the same threat but they don't get to cover their faces so no one knows who they are. So they are running around in unmarked cars and chasing down anyone they think is here illegally. I have a problem with that especially when one of things they use for criteria is a person's race. If you look Hispanic you are at a greater risk of being stopped and questioned and if you don't have some form of identification on you even if you're a citizen they take you to their station to verify your status and there are a lot of people who have entered the country illegally from Mexico and Central America because for the previous four years the guy with dementia encouraged millions of people to cross the southern border illegally. His administration even created a cell phone app that allowed people to request asylum after entering the country illegally. I don't like racial profiling. Knowing a suspects race is beneficial when searching for a suspect that has been identified, but looking for a suspect when all you know is their race is against our basic civil rights. It's been unconstitutional for at least fifty years but they're doing it now. Someone filed a lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court. Several lower courts had rule that racial profiling was against the law, but the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government. 

I couldn't believe it. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial profiling was now legal again. I was genuinely surprised. Probably more than I should have been and I still don't get it. If they can pick on people because of their race what about their political affiliation? Or their membership in the local Elks Lodge or what if they belong to the wrong church? I was in favor of deporting illegal aliens who were committing crimes. To me that was obvious and only democrats were opposed to that. Not only did President Trump let me down by ignoring the civil rights violations, but the Supreme Court agreed with him. So what about the Bill of Rights? As a detective for a major American police department for almost forty years we were bound by it. The Fourth and Fourteenth amendments prohibited unreasonable searches and seizures and guaranteed equal protections under the law. I don't know if those protections are still available to us. I personally don't think the possible dangers presented by the presence of illegal aliens justifies giving up our civil rights. If the cost of border security is giving up our constitutional rights then let's put together some sort of mutual aid agreement with Mexico that allows access on both sides of the border. 

    

     

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY

After four years of a president with dementia who couldn't even find his way off a platform from which he had just given one of his pathetic incoherent speeches we finally have a strong president with goals and ambitions to rebuild America and restore our standing in the world. He has hired a director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who is not afraid to deport people who are here illegally. He selected an Attorney General who is not afraid to enforce the law and will not seek to throw people in jail just because she doesn't like them or they belong to the wrong political party. His new director of the Department of Health and Human Services is aggressively going after people in the food industry that are putting unnecessary additives in our food. He is also trying to make sure Americans aren't over immunized. Every person President Trump has nominated for a cabinet position is going to do a good job. Then to top it off President Trump started a Department of Government Accountability. Elon Musk has been chosen to lead that department and he is going after government waste with a recking ball. He has to because he only has three months to cut the waste out of the federal budget and he is find hundreds of millions of dollars that are being wasted or stolen because director of DOGE is a temporary position. 

It is amazing how much waste there is in the federal budget. It is disappointing how much theft there is and democrats are condemning any audits that have been ordered. It seems to me that they depend on theft for their campaign contributions. It looks like they depend on illegal immigration for a lot of their votes too. Watching a news program I saw a reporter asking people who were still in Mexico waiting for an opportunity to cross into the United States where they were headed. Some said New York City, others mentioned a variety of other cities, such as Detroit, it was almost always a city on the east coast or near the Great Lakes. A surprising number said, "Joe Biden." It makes sense to me that they thought they were being asked who they were going to vote for since the election was only a few weeks away and in a lot of states like California they register people to vote when they get their driver's license, which is something any person who sneaks across the border can easily apply for. While they are applying for a driver's license they can also register to vote. All a person has to do to register to vote is check a box stating they have legal status in the United States then sign the application. Just like that another democrat voter is registered. 

Ordinarily I'd say 'government accountability' is an oxymoron, but not with President Trump. He takes his Oath of Office very seriously and is determined to make our government more efficient. Of a necessity that means that some people will lose their jobs; especially in the departments where workers aren't required to report for work or refuse to do so upon being ordered to. Seizing upon an opportunity to make President Trump look bad democrats are on the airwaves everyday saying that any federal lay offs endangers children, and any cut to an agency's budget means they'll have to cut services to children and the elderly on Medicare or Social Security. Whenever they are tasked with the prospect of budget cuts bureaucrats always cut the most vital services first. Food programs to aid hungry children, Social Security, Medicare. Those are always the only programs bureaucrats can think of to cut. It's never the extra cars that don't get used or the new furniture requests or the people who are being paid but have little or nothing to do, or the request for new people. Bureaucrats always look for the most painful cuts that can be made and propose those first. 

Elon Musk isn't buying it. I've worked with a lot of bureaucrats over the years and I've rarely heard the managers brag about how efficient their employees are, it's always about the size of the budget they manage which is always huge, but never enough to get the job done. Musk can spot waste in a jiff and he's been swinging that recking ball twenty four hours a day. He'll cut billions from the federal budget without making unnecessary cuts to medicaid or medicare. Politicians like to pretend they are doing everyone a huge favor by 'saving' entitlements like social security, but Social Security is not an entitlement. People receive Social Security based on the number of years they contributed throughout their working lives. When they are talking about cuts to Social Security they are talking about breaking a promise made to working Americans in 1935 by a democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

When the right president has been elected and he assembles the right team government accountability becomes a real possibility. 

The Mystery of the January 6th riot at the Capitol

This is one of my favorite topics, especially now that the election is over and Donald Trump is our president again. I was fortunate to work thirty six years for America's finest police department; the LAPD. We spent hundreds of hours practicing crowd control and studying how to help keep peaceful protests from becoming violent riots. There are lots of things the police can do to prevent protesters from becoming rioters and the Capitol police didn't seem to know any of them. One of the most basic is to leave people in the crowd an avenue of escape when you want them to disperse. The Capitol police actually blocked any avenue of escape and forced some people in the crowd to enter the Capitol building to avoid being injured by the police. I don't think the police wanted to hurt them or drive them inside the building they just looked like they'd never been trained on the psychology or the proper way to deploy resources to disperse a group of protesters once they become destructive or violent. One good way is to divide the crowd by using police officers lined up back to back and pushing the crowd away using short jabs toward them with the police baton and ordering them to 'back up!'

That way you can split up the crowd and call on police officers standing by at the perimeter to move in and arrest individuals who are inciting riots or passing out dangerous materials. In doing so you can also move in more police as needed to move the now divided crowd away from the building. As near as I could tell they didn't even attempt that. All they did was stand behind their flimsy barricades and wait to be trampled. Once they realized they were about to lose their barrier tug of war with the protesters they decided to deploy non lethal munitions and chemical irritants which they used about as effectively as a group of elementary school second graders might. It's not that clear what type of chemical irritant the police used, if it was tear gas or pepper spray canisters, but it is clear that whatever they used was used ineffectively. The idea is to move the crowd away from the building, and the police, and then to disperse them entirely. The proper way to deploy such munitions is to fire them at the feet of the protesters in the front, pushing them back and following them continuously, forcing them to continue their retreat. 

The Capitol police were firing their munitions deep either into the middle of the crowd or just behind them. That had the effect of blinding them and making it hard for them to breathe and at the same time blocking any avenue of escape. That forced a lot of them to run toward the barricades and seek safety inside the building. A panicked crowd of protesters is about the last thing a police department wants to have to deal with, but that's exactly what the Capitol police did; they panicked people in the crowd making them more dangerous to the police and to each other. Along with that we may never know what the FBI assets that had been planted among the protesters were telling them. The result was that some Capitol police officers were injured and more damage was done to the building. Another thing that could be done at the same time as the crowd is being dispersed by the police pushing them back, another group of police officers could approach them from behind and pull them back ensuring that the crowd didn't regroup. Anyone who appeared particularly dangerous would be handcuffed and detained in a secure area some distance away where they could be processed and detained for later transportation to the jail.

The police could have been divided into squads with a squad leader and three or four squads would then be put under the supervision of a higher ranking official providing directions and orders for deployment. The deployment of non lethal munitions or chemical irritants should not be at the discretion of individual police officers or their squad leaders. That order should come from somewhere higher up the chain of command for at least two reasons; one it makes someone accountable for the decision and it makes the deployment more successful because it is done in an orderly and targeted fashion, not just randomly lobbing incendiary devices into the crowd. It would also give someone higher up the chain to use a microphone to deliver a dispersal order to the protesters warning them what was about to happen if they didn't leave and giving them another chance voluntarily leave the area, which is oftentimes an effective tool that reduces some of the nervousness and tension. The person ordering the deployment of chemical irritants could also then direct where the munitions should be aimed; at the feet of the nearest protesters rapidly and in a concentrated fire By four or five police officers standing shoulder to shoulder and advancing toward the protesters, and directing them to continue to back up and leave. This tactic usually does cause the protesters to back away quickly to an area farther away from the intended target and toward awaiting police officers who are standing by to direct them to the avenue of egress, or to arrest any who become violent. 

I couldn't tell who was giving the order for the Capitol police to fire chemical irritant munitions into the crowd, but it was clear that there was no order to it. They were firing into the middle of the group at random, not concentrating on any particular area, or even farther away at the rear of the group protesting effectively cutting off their avenue of escape which is not an effective way to persuade protesters to leave. Lots of other things went wrong as well, including inside the building where the police failed to effectively take control of the building's interior room by room in an aggressive and orderly manner. 

The entire spectacle was an embarrassment that ended in chaos, injury and death. Much of which could have been avoided if the police had acted professionally instead of creating a chaotic scene resembling one mob facing off against another mob. Training is so important. Proper training saves lives and protects property. 

Then to add to the embarrassment the FBI moved in and conducted an investigation ignoring the law and bullying people into pleading guilty to things many of them were not guilty of. Probably. It became clear to most people that the FBI was on a political vendetta orchestrated by the Biden administration. For one thing a Capitol police officer had murdered an unarmed woman and they had to do whatever they could to make it look legitimate. In addition to that the Capitol police had been very ineffective at crowd control so special emphasis had to be put on the behavior of the protesters and focus taken away from the embarrassing tactics of the police. 

Ever since Donald Trump announced in 2015 that he was going to run for President of the United States as a Republican the Obama controlled Department of Justice began a long and arduous campaign to illegally spy on him, his family members, friends and associates and single them out for special treatment. They paid a former member of the British version of the CIA to compile a dossier on Candidate Trump, paying him a reported million dollars plus. The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation authorized the submission of a false affidavit to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge in order to illegally use electronic surveillance against Trump and his associates. They used the information they gained to further damage their reputation by presenting more false affidavits to criminal courts so they could conduct illegal searches of several of the homes of Trump's friends, associates and family members. 

They claimed that Trump was an agent of the Russian government who was trying to use his influence to make money by getting the support of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. During his candidacy Trump was arrested four different times for crimes that were never committed and any convictions will be almost certainly be overturned by appellate courts. Two of the cases have already been dismissed, another court convicted and sentenced him for paying a woman to stop publicly making up lies about him which has never been a crime before. His sentence was "unconditional discharge" on January 10th, 2025. Most likely this case will also be overturned by the appellate process. Two of the judges trying the cases against him are probably illegal aliens who will hopefully be deported even though they have lived here for about fifty years having been brought here as children by their parents. 

All of these facts help create a foundation of illegal activities the FBI and the DOJ participated in upon becoming agents of the Democrat party instead of being true to their Oath to uphold the Constitution. Now that President Trump has been elected and most of the illegal charges have been dropped, in other words the democrat's efforts to stop him from campaigning have failed it's time to investigate the investigators. We don't want revenge, we just want to take steps to ensure that the FBI never joins an effort to undermine the Constitution again and that's going to mean firing most of the FBI leadership and seeking Special Agents who are not loyal to any particular individual or party, but to the Constitution they took an oath to protect. In the organization I worked for lying to a judge to secure a warrant against anyone was a criminal as well as a fireable offense. The FBI should be held to the same standard. 

Dodging Bullets

During the 2024 election cycle we dodged the bullet once again, figuratively and literally. I'm not going to stop saying that Democrats didn't try to assassinate Donald Trump during this past election cycle. I'm not willing to admit that the United States Secret Service has fallen from one of the absolute best personal protection organizations in the world to perhaps the worst. 

Exhibit #1 is the building 150 yards from the podium with a clear view of the podium. For one thing the head of the Secret Service has provided at least three different versions of the reason why that building was not covered; it was the responsibility of the local police department to secure that building. It had a severely sloped roof that made it unsafe to put people up there. They knew it was a problem so they decided to secure it from the inside. There still isn't any reason provided for the Secret Service marksman with a clear view of the building in question not taking preventive measures against the would be assassin before he started shooting. They had a clear view of him, why didn't they alert the people inside the building that the sound they were hearing of a person walking on the roof was a man with a rifle and maybe they should check it out? A police officer alerted by a citizen witness did get a clear view of the assassin, but the assassin threatened to shoot him so he retreated. Smart move but why didn't he tell anyone at the Secret Service to keep Donald Trump away from the podium? Those simple moves would have saved Donald Trump from being wounded in the head and an innocent Trump supporter being killed. It also could possibly have saved the life of the assassin who then could have been questioned about his motives and anyone who may have put him up to the task. 

Exhibit #2 is the stage itself. Since they knew about the potential for a disaster from the building 150 yards from the podium and with a clear view of the podium why didn't they put up some sort of screen so a potential assassin couldn't get a clear shot from the rooftop? Obviously the Secret Service has suffered a lapse in training and may possibly even be criminally culpable. Not the men and women on the ground risking their lives, but the jerks in the leadership who set them all up for failure and possibly even being murdered themselves. 

Exhibit #3 Donald Trump is about six feet four inches tall. Why was he being protected by women who were about five feet five inches tall, one of them appeared even shorter than that? 

Exhibit #4 The FBI so-called investigation. Why did they have someone clean up the crime scene before anyone took photographs? Why was the bad guy's body cremated without performing a autopsy? 

There are probably other questions that I missed, but those are important items. If he hadn't turned to look at that chart when he did he would be dead now. He would be dead and America would have been brought into another state of confusion and doubt and mistrust and all other emotions that accompany such a horrible event. Democrats would have been rid of their tormentor. Donald Trump was not just a political candidate to them. He was the man running for president who was going to do his best to stop their coup. He was going to respect the Constitution and stop all of the illegal shenanigans that democrats had resorted to in their effort to fundamentally change America and install a monarchy. Because Donald Trump survived the brutal attack the entire country dodged a bullet. 

He didn't just win the presidential election, but because the Biden administration did such a horrible job and Kamala Harris ran such a bad campaign, the democrats lost the House of Representatives and the Senate as well. I guess I wasn't the only one who was tired of hearing Chuck Schumer's lies all the time. 

Hopefully if democrats try to kill him again, Donald Trump will live to serve his entire four year term. This is the first time that we've ever had a reason to suspect that the Secret Service was actually complicit in an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate they were supposed to protect. This attempt is eerily similar to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy who was shot and killed under suspicious circumstances. Both crimes have given us cause to suspect that federal law enforcement may have been in on the planning and the subsequent cover up of the murder of a president and presidential candidate for political reasons.