Category Archives: Government

Outliving Their Usefulness

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Now that The Party is back in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the members of the Inner Party who got the plum positions are working to secure their power. (“The object of power is power.“) Of course, this requires that certain individuals who were useful in removing Orange Man Bad from office need to be neutralized or eliminated lest they become competitors rather than allies.

Cuomo must go. #MeTooing him has the advantage of putting Outer Party members at the head of the mob, and allows him to be taken out without having to actually be held to account for the nursing home deaths that have not played well with the Proles.

Newsom must go. He has been too incautious in flaunting his Inner Party privileges.

Whitmer must go. She made a fool of herself while auditioning for the VP nomination last year. While there is beginning to be some legal pushback on her record of nursing home deaths, if’s likely that another scandal will be found for her as well.

There are others on the list. It will be interesting to see who gets taken down as the junta attempts to secure its hold on power.

I’m So Old …

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… I remember when we reformed what was then called “welfare as we know it.”

I remember that Joe Xiden voted for the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, but it seems that he’s changed what little is left of his mind. According to a report by The Heritage Foundation, the Administration’s welfare plan would significantly raise cash grants while ending existing work obligations in the current child credit program. It abandons any link between work and welfare established by welfare reform in the 1990s and goes back to the principle of unconditional entitlement to taxpayer-funded benefits.

It All Depends On What You Mean By “Equality”

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The House has passed a legislative nightmare called the “Equality Act.” If it passes the Senate and becomes law, it would amend federal statutes to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and it explicitly will destroy religious freedom protections related to sexual and gender identity. The bill explicitly states: “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

Stephen Kruiser has suggested that the Equality Act is proof that the Democrats are clinically insane. OTOH, The Party may need the words “equal” and “equality” to have different meanings. Sometimes  two plus two equals four. But not always.

Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

Elections Have Consequences

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The election of 1856 put James Buchanan in the White House. He is generally viewed as one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history. Buchanan won the election by carrying every slave state except Maryland while the rest of the country split their votes between Republican John Fremont and Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore. Buchanan understood who elected him.

Buchanan intervened in the Supreme Court to gather majority support of the pro-slavery decision in the Dred Scott case. He supported the Southern attempt to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state, angering both the Republicans and also many Northern Democrats. Finally, he failed to take action to stop Southern states from seceding during the last months of his administration.

That’s the sort of thing that happens when the Democrats win an election and come to believe that their grasp on the reins of power is so absolute they can act with impunity.

History doesn’t repeat itself in the sense of actual do-overs. Indeed, it does a very poor job of rhyming. But certain themes do reoccur, and one of them in impatient overreach by wannabe elitists.

The next couple of years may be quite ugly.

District Court Enjoins Deportation Ban

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The temporary injunction on Joe Xiden’s 100-day pause in deportations of criminal aliens was set to expire yesterday, but U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued the preliminary injunction sought by Texas, indefinitely extending the injunction. This isn’t the first time a district judge has issued a nationwide injunction relating to immigration policy. The Democrats went forum shopping to Hawaii to find a judge willing to put a monkey wrench in the ban travel from seven hostile and terror ridden countries.

The Gentle Reader should not be surprised if the usual suspects on the Left suddenly begin a bit more suspicious of judicial activism.

BTW, Marvin was unavailable for comment.

Transferring Money From Red States to Blue

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The fifty states have functioned as laboratories of democracy in their varied responses to the Wuhan Virus Pandemic. For the most part, it’s been the blue states who have done the most damage to their economies, and it’s these states that the Democrats in Congress want to bail out.

It might be wise for Congress to review some basic principles of planning and economics before they act. I’m providing a link to a basic economics text at Amazon that should be simple enough for most of the members of the House and Senate to understand.

The Capitol Bombing?

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This is from the conformation hearing for Merrick Garland, Joe Xiden’s nominee for Attorney General.

There’s a joke that can be teased out of that about it not being over after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, but the real good news about Garland is that Cocaine Mitch kept him off the Supreme Court back in 2016.

 

Don’t Know Much About Algebra

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For those of you who don’t know the Sam Cooke song Wonderful World (the first line of that song is “Don’t know much about history …”), this is a line from the second stanza. I think it makes a good headline for a post about teachers who don’t understand math.

Fox reports that the Oregon Department of Educations is seeking to undo white supremacy in mathematics education. The minicourse being offered to teachers

includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

I wonder how many of the education bureaucrats who are promoting the course would object to the calculations on their paychecks being done on the basis of 2 + 2 = 3.

Unjust Justice

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Rev. William Barber has a post over at In These Times about The Fight for a $15 Minimum Wage Is a Fight for Racial Justice. He quotes a loose translation of the beginning of the 10th chapter of Isaiah in support of his argument—

Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights, who make women and children their prey.

I agree with Rev. Barber that those of us who are better off have an obligation to treat the poor justly and to compassionately care for widows and the fatherless. However, I believe the minimum wage increase he supports will hurt rather than help the poor. Indeed, passing such a law will be legislating an evil.

The general effect of increasing the minimum wage is to price workers with marginal skills out of the labor market. Businesses don’t have bottomless funds from which they pay wages. They can only extract so much revenue from their customers, and that money must be divided among paying for inventory, rent, wages, and other expenses. A minimum wage bill doesn’t make expenses like rent disappear, so a business only has so much it can divide among its workers for payroll. When the law artificially increases each worker’s pay, simple arithmetic shows that fewer workers can be paid before the money is gone. Business that survive will keep their best employees and fire marginal workers. Business that grow will hire fewer workers.

Not every worker who loses his job because of a minimum wage increase will remain unemployed. Some will find work off-the-books in the informal economy, but increasing the minimum wage invariably increase unemployment among our poorest citizens.

We Americans generally believe that everyone has a right to work to support himself and family. Is it just to pass a law artificially pricing poor workers out of the labor market? I don’t think so.

CZ Buys Colt

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The Czech gun manufacturer CZG has announced that it will acquire all of Colt’s business for $220 million and about 1.1 million new shares of the Czech firm’s stock.

I’m not surprised. I’ve often thought that there would be good synergy between the two companies’ engineering departments and that CZ’s management would be able to straighten out Colt’s history of chronic mismanagement.

CZ is building a factory in Arkansas. It will be interesting to see how long it will take for Connecticut’s anti-gun policies to drive Colt’s manufacturing from Hartford to Little Rock.

Hoax de l’Année

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Last year, the Democrats wasted the Senate’s time with the Ukraine Phone Call Hoax after the previous multi-year Russia Collusion Hoax fell apart. This year, they’re peddling the Insurrection Incitement Hoax. Trump Derangement Syndrome has clearly overwhelmed what was left of the Democrats’ ability to reason rationally. As Lawrence Pearson notes over at BattleSwarm Blog—

For a party that failed to flip a single statehouse chamber in November, Democrats are freebasing dangerous levels of their own bullshit in ratcheting up the rhetorical hysteria.

You don’t get high on your own supply because the moment you start deluding yourself, reality has a nasty way of smacking you upside the head.

Let them have their Impeachment 2: Electric Boogaloo. It won’t result in a conviction. It won’t affect Donald Trump’s standing with his supporters or his detractors. But it will delay the Senate from action on Joe Xiden’s initial legislative goals and confirmation of His Fraudulency’s nominees.

Enjoy the show.

UPDATE—Stupid is as stupid does.

Looking Out For Their Own Interests

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When a political party achieves firm control of the levers of power, it’s not surprising that it will begin to take action that promotes the interests of the party’s supporters. For example, Donald Trump and Cocaine Mitch put a significant number of conservative judges on federal courts, including three Associate Justices at the Supreme Court.

Joe Xiden is doing the same for the his supporters. For example, he’s nominated William J. Burns to head the CIA. Currently, Mr Burns is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank that has reportedly accepted funds from sources with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, just a return to the Old Normal.

Quote of the Day

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There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the people, but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people, to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial. The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant.

—Benjamin Harrison

BREAKING: A Politician May Have Lied

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A few days ago, a congresscritter from New York told a tearful story of a near-death experience during the Capitol Riot. Reviews of the factual record appears to contradict important elements of the story, and hashtags such as #AlexandriaOcasioSmollet have been trending on Twitter.

The usually suspect “fact checkers” have rushed to defend the congresscritter’s story by pointing out that claim she wasn’t in the Capitol is mostly false because she wasn’t there but in another building instead. Remember, a story may be fake but accurate if it fits The Narrative.

Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress want to punish a Republican congresscritter because she said some things that don’t fit The Narrative.

Democracy Dies in Derpness™

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WaPo seems to imply that because the Democrats disagree with Trump’s assessment of the election’s integrity, his speech should not be protected under the First Amendment. You’d think that a media outlet such as WaPo would be an ardent defender of the First Amendment and the American principle that the cure for bad/stupid/wrong speech is more speech exposing errors rather than censorship.

OTOH, WaPo’s preferred politicians are running the show for the moment, so they feel safe—and the other side tends to play by our historic rules of press freedom, so WaPo has never been under any serious threat for the government.

Hmmmmm.

Correction to the Correction to the Correction

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At this time, as a public service, we are glad to post the following superceding additional supplementary bulletin from the Office of Fluctuation Control and Ceiling Repairs, Bureau of Edible Condiments, Soluable, Insoluable, and Indigestible Fats and Glutenous Derivitives, Washington, D.C.:

Correction of the Correction of the Correction of Directive 943456201, issued earlier today, February 2, 2021. First correction: that number is now 943456202. The second correction: please note that said Directive reading “chopped hogmeat” formerly reading “ground hogmeat” formerly reading “groundhog meat” should now read “sausage.”

At the Intersection of All Things

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Noted warmmonger Gina McCarthy, who ran Obama’s EPA, has been appointed as His Fraudulency’s National Climate Advisor. She posted a video over the past weekend making the pitch that climate change is a racism/social justice issue. No verifiable facts were offered to support any of her claims.

One of the claims that she makes is that the Xiden climate program will result in the creation of good paying “union jobs.” 27 states have right-to-work laws that allow people to work without having to join a union, and very few of those states cast electoral votes for Joe Xiden. Is this “union jobs” claim a threat to shift economic activity away from those states to punish them? Would that be socially just?

Another claim is that the Xiden climate program will leverage existing technologies. OK, how will the administration deal with the problems created by those technologies? The blades from worn-out wind turbines are going into land fills because there is no economically viable way of recycling them. Solar arrays that have reached the end of their useful lives are beginning to pile up, creating a significant amount of waste that includes heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and cadmium. Will racial and social justice require this waste to be disposed of in Palo Alto, Belle Meade, Stamford, or Bethesda?

And back to those union jobs? Where will they really be, and what will they be doing? Under the Xiden program, they won’t be for pipe fitters building pipelines in the middle of America. When Gina McCarthy was running the EPA, American labor saw a lot of “clean energy” jobs making equipment such as solar panels and wind turbines move offshore, principally to China. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but usual the safe way to bet.

Is it 2025 yet?

Correction to the Correction

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At this time, as a public service, we are glad to post the following supplementary bulletin from the Office of Fluctuation Control and Ceiling Repairs, Bureau of Edible Condiments, Soluble, Insoluble, and Indigestible Fats and Glutinous Derivatives, Washington, D.C.:

Correction of Directive 943456201, issued earlier today, February 2, 2021, concerning the fixed price of groundhog meat. In the Directive above-named, the price-fixed low-water-level quotation on groundhog meat should read “ground hogmeat.”