Monthly Archives: May 2020

House Relief Bill

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Here’s what’s in the House “relief” bill, written in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) kitchen where she could have ready access to her special ice cream. The bill was written with zero Republican input, zero Republican amendments, carefully limited debate on the House floor, and passed almost entirely along party lines; although the bill did make 14 Progressive-Democrats choke to the point of voting against it, and one Republican was too timid to oppose it.

  • $1 trillion in funding for state and local governments

Money that State and local government do not need. To the extent that Federal funds—the dollars of taxpayers who are citizens of other States—are needed in a particular State, those funds should go directly to the point of need: the individual citizens and those citizens’ individual businesses.

  • relief to wealthy residents of high-tax states like New York by waiving the $10,000 cap on the federal State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction for 2020 and 2021

These look like the same 1% that the Progressive-Democrats hate so much, and they look like the folks ex-President Barack Obama (D) disdained as having made enough money. But they’re not the same 1%—their the rich donors to the Progressive-Democratic Party and Party-supported causes.

  • explicitly omitting Hyde Amendment limits on Federal abortion funding
  • explicitly withdrawing the work requirement criterion for food stamps

It’s important to keep in mind, on that last, that the work requirement wasn’t limited to requiring actual work. In lieu of work, the recipient could seek work, train for work (vis., take community college classes, intern, etc), do volunteer work, and so on.

Other goodies include

  • student loan debt forgiveness
  • $25 billion for the Postal Service
  • $3.6 billion to states for planning and preparation of elections

That last contains a national requirement to hold elections by mail—the Progressive-Democrats’ unconstitutional attempt to Federalize our elections.

All that money, and all of it is irrelevant to the supposed need for additional relief from the economic dislocation to which the Wuhan Virus situation has led. The Progressive-Democrats could have passed an actual relief bill, but they’ve chosen—again—to hold relief hostage until they’re paid their ransom in the form of their leftist wish list.

The Progressive-Democrats also could have sat back and done nothing for the moment, following the Senate’s recommendation that Government stop throwing money around and instead observe the effects of the money already shoveled out into the firebox.

No. The Progressive-Democrats chose instead to provide in Bill form, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign platform.

How cynical. Especially during this period of economic distress.

Time for a New Plan

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That’s what Dr Marty Makary, Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, says.  Broad lockdowns might have been justified at the outset of the present Wuhan Virus situation, but new information has arisen.

Since that time, we have data that has taught us that this infection is associated with public transit, with density, with mass gatherings, with city-to-city travel and it is associated with climate[.]

And

What we do know, [is that] there are safe ways to conduct activities in society if we use certain precautions and we probably need a targeted approach where we find areas where there is either an outbreak or an ongoing increase in cases, and use some of the more aggressive strategies in that particular location.

A man once said, When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?

Some State governors, when the facts change, reemphasize their original positions, denying that change has occurred.

Vote Harvester

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden said proudly during a primary debate—back when Party held such things—that, if nominated, he would select a woman for his running mate.

There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow. I would pick a woman to be my vice president[.]

Notice that.  Biden did not say he would pick a Vice President candidate who would happen to be a woman. He said he would pick a woman who happened to be qualified.

He has denied women their humanity—they’re only tools for harvesting votes.

Now we have the latest Progressive-Democrat anxious to be objectified, all in the name of personal political profit.

Susan Rice would be “humbled and honored” to be reduced to a vote harvesting tool, her humanity denied. After all, Biden has openly said–bragged–that he’d select his running mate on the basis of her sex, and not on her qualifications.

This is the #YouTooMaybe Party.

So much for #MeToo.

Trade Needs

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In an article about, among other things, the People’s Republic of China’s attempt to extort Australia into sitting down and shutting up about the PRC’s role in the Wuhan Virus’ spread across Earth, David Thomas, a consultant who for several decades has advised Australian businesses on investing in the PRC, said this:

The world is going to need China’s capital, manufacturing, and consumption power when this is all over.

That’s so wrong it’s foolish. We’re discovering that now, and after the Wuhan Virus situation has been dealt with from medical and economic perspectives, that we can’t afford to be very economically involved in the PRC.

The size of the PRC’s consumer population would be nice to access, but it’s unaffordable from economic and national security perspectives. The barriers erected to entry into that market are excessively high. The intellectual property and technology transfer demands exacted as a condition of doing business there and the outright theft of those things done not only from the foreign companies extant inside the PRC but from those foreign companies’ home nations are overt threats to security.

The world does not need the PRC’s manufacturing power at all. There are lots of other nations scattered around Asia, Europe, North America, and South America that are fully capable of filling the manufacturing role in place of the PRC, and there are many nations in Africa that are fully capable of developing into viable manufacturing sources.

Nor does the world need the PRC’s capital. Like its consumer market, it would be nice to access some of it, but it will be accessed adequately to the extent the world’s nations sell their goods and services to consumers in the PRC. However, we can’t afford that part of PRC capital that would be used to buy technology-oriented businesses in order to acquire those technologies.

Kerry Stokes, a billionaire mining-equipment and media magnate is just as foolish.

If we’re going to go into the biggest debt we’ve had in our life and then simultaneously poke our biggest provider of income in the eye it’s not necessarily the smartest thing you can do. We are a trading nation. We have nothing else to do but trade[.]

Australia does, indeed, need to trade. But it doesn’t need to trade with an enemy. It does need to change trading partners, and there are a planet-ful of nations that can substitute, individually or in groups, for that enemy.

It’s time for the free nations, the free market nations, of the globe to stop letting themselves be cowed by where their next trade dollar is going to come from and start thinking, instead, about the material and security cost of that dollar and to start thinking about where the trade dollar after the next will come from.

Holding Thoughts

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Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) is facing then-candidate and now President Donald Trump-Russia collusion transcript revelations—many of which show that Schiff knew that witnesses in closed-door/sworn testimony before House committee hearings to which he was party said unequivocally that they knew of no such collusion—that show how thoroughly and blatantly he lied in his public remarks about his hard evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia.

Now Schiff is claiming that the revelations are just Republican efforts to distract us all from the Wuhan Virus situation and Trump’s supposed mishandling of it.

Schiff has begun claiming, instead, that us ordinary Americans are incapable of holding two thoughts in our minds at the same time, we’re incapable of concentrating on two problems simultaneously, we can’t do two things at once.

Schiff is projecting, again. Or, Schiff is lying, again.