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Farewell to Paul Ryan
Where have we seen this before?
Former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan has made it known he will not attend the 2024 Republican Convention if the nominee is former President Donald Trump. The convention is set to take place in Milwaukee in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin.
So. Here we go again. All but declaring his devotion to RINOism — Republican in Name Only — Ryan has slid a long way down the pole from the rising star conservative he was once thought to be.
The man who was the vice presidential nominee on the 2012 ticket with Mitt Romney seemingly has no realization that yes, in fact, he and Romney lost their election while Trump won his in 2016. They played the RINO card and got clobbered.
Let’s cut to the chase. What’s really going on here is that someone got used to swimming in the Washington/establishment Swamp — and thus has nothing but disdain for the Outsider President.
And yes, the Republican Party has been here before.
Keep reading but the real point is that it is time to rake out the garbage again,
Madrid learns from New Spain
We are fans of Italy’s new, populist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Now it appears that a similar figure is rising in Spain: Madrid’s President, Isabel Díaz Ayuso:
Fresh from freeing Madrid from lockdown, Isabel Díaz Ayuso is waging a war on woke and seeking to turn Madrid into the “Florida of Europe” in a campaign that could ultimately lead to her becoming Spain’s first female prime minister.
The “Florida of Europe” is another indication of how thoroughly American politics have penetrated Europe. Thus, too, the fact that Diaz Ayuso’s enemies call her Spain’s Trumpista.
With two crunch elections on the horizon, Madrid’s president is ready for the political fight of her life: to topple the socialist-communist coalition government of Pedro Sánchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party.
It is amazing that any civilized country still has a socialist-communist government. No wonder Spain has been a basket case.
The Right-wing firebrand is running for re-election in May in a vote seen as crucial before the battle for Spain’s future is fought in December’s general elections. Her supporters praise her as “Saint Isabel”, but the regional leader is a hate figure for the Left, which brands her a “Trumpista” or “fascist”.
In Spain, as in America, a politician who wants to reduce the power and scope of government is bizarrely branded a “fascist.”
Heh, a “DeSantista” in Old Spain, and as always, it works to the benefit of the people, not the government.
Are You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago?
Well you know the answer This is a good article that shows how we got here, and how to start turning the ship around.
Higher, Farther, Faster, even if it kills us.
[Jason Morgan writes] It was 1998 and I needed an e-mail address. Back then, nobody used their real names for e-mail. E-mailing was like C.B. radio—you used a handle. I remember thinking for a few seconds and then typing “aeelectra” into the little box on the Hotmail screen. Success. I had signed up.
In those stray moments trying to come up with what was essentially a totemic pseudonym, an image arose before my mind, silvered and fine. It was a photograph from National Geographic, the January 1998 issue. The photograph was a bust of Amelia Earhart wearing a Mona Lisa smile. Her pilot’s license photo, a Venus in a fur-lined flying cap (freckled, gap-toothed, and tomboyish in the talking pictures), a high-modern Man Ray-esque tragic paradigm whom death stalked and fame carried.
Tragic Earhart went down with navigator Fred Noonan in Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E Special two days before July 4, 1937, to a grave either watery or archipelagic—it is still unknown which—in the gold-flecked azure of the vast Pacific. They were trying to circle the globe at the equator, something no one had ever done before. Earhart had already tried and failed once. The second time would kill her.
But the ending isn’t how I remember Amelia Earhart. I remember her at the beginning, when the winds that shouldered her plane wings skyward seemed also to move in her photographed young eyes. That image in National Geographic of a fresh-faced Amelia haunted me then and does still. Her plaintive face peered out of the gelatin print, a plain American beauty, asking a question that somehow only the heavens could answer.
Amelia Earhart went up into the sky as her lifework from the time of that early photograph until the very last moment, engines singing. “The love of flying is the love of beauty,” National Geographic quoted Earhart as saying. “It is more beautiful up there than anything I had known.”
This sentiment is, to my mind, the essence of being an American. One is on the move, higher, to where there is beauty over the sky-draped land.
As long as I can remember that Hoosier farm girl above has been one of my heroes, for exactly the reason he states. I inherited a fascination with flying from my father, who until the last hospitalization of his life would look longingly at the contrails in the sky, being a technical sort born almost exactly four years after that windy morning at Kittyhawk.
And that Lockheed Electra was bought for the flight by the Purdue Foundation, where she was Assistant Dean of Women, in Apollo One, two of our Alumni would ‘touch the face of God’ as the poet put it, and 32 years after Amelia was lost another alumnus would go higher, faster, and further than ever a man had, and walk on the moon. NASA still hires many of the graduates of The Cradle of Astronauts.
And now a South African immigrant has caught the American Dream and wants to go back to the moon and then colonize Mars. It will be a terrible, hardscrabble existence no doubt, but in American history will it be any worse really than going westering in the Mayflower, or down the Oregon Trail, or even through the Boonsborough Pass even against the King’s orders
By the way, Daniel Boone himself died at a ripe old age, on his farm west of St. Louis. For him, as for us now, heaven is over the western horizon, where Reagan keeps watch, and we’ve always been driven to get there higher, faster, and farther even if it kills us, and sometimes it does.
There’s an old saying about the Oregon Trail, but I think it’s really about America.
The cowards never started and the weak died on the road
And for our Welsh readers, and thinking about my dearest friend
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant
