Monthly Archives: July 2021

“We stand for what is right across the world”

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In a virtual Congressional hearing last Tuesday—Corporate Sponsorship of the 2022 Beijing Olympics—there was this exchange between Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) and Paul Lalli, Coca-Cola’s Global Vice President for Human Rights and corporate representative at the hearing:

SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): So your company said at the time that we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the United States. So are we to take from your statement at the time that Coca Cola will not stand up for what is right outside the United States? Because that’s what it sounds like this morning in this testimony.
PAUL LALLI, COCA-COLA’S GLOBAL VICE PRESIDENT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS: No, Senator, we stand up for what is right across the world. We apply the same human rights principles in the United States that we do across the world.
COTTON: Do you believe that the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the Uyghur people?
LALLI: We’re aware of the reports of the State Department on this issue as well. There are other departments of the US government. We respect those reports. They continue to inform our program, as do reports from other from civil society.

Think about that deliberately vapid non-response. Coca Cola stands for what’s right across the world, and Coca Cola doesn’t object to the People’s Republic of China’s abuse, much less genocide, of the Uyghurs in the PRC’s Xinjiang province.

Nor was it just Cotton that the Coca-Cola rep refused to answer. Progressive-Democrat Tom Malinowski (D, NJ) pressed Lalli specifically on whether Coca-Cola would condemn any Chinese government abuses against Uyghurs. Lalli’s carefully empty response:

We respect all human rights.

It seems pretty clear: Coca Cola considers that abuse, that genocide, to be part of what’s right across the world. Because Uighurs, in Coca-Cola’s august consideration, don’t count as human or otherwise worthy of human rights.

Systemic Racism

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As my wife and better half says, “The tote board tells the tale.”

The title of the Senate Amendment might be hard to read (even after a Right Click|Open in New Tab maneuver), so:

To prohibit Federal funding for any institution of higher education that discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admissions.
Amendment Rejected (49-48, 60 votes required)

All 49 Yeas were, without exception, Republican. All 48 Nays, rejecting this anti-discrimination amendment and by extension overtly supporting discrimination by race, were, without exception, Progressive-Democrat.

The amendment was to S937, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Even though this cloture vote was last April, it’s remains as a shocking example of the systemic racism that is in a significant part of our nation—the systemic racism that pervades the Progressive-Democratic Party.

The Progressive-Democrats’ unanimous decision to kill an actual anti-hate amendment to a Hate Crimes bill is…ironic.

Union Political Spending, Union Political Power

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A couple of numbers illustrate the matter.

Organized labor spent more than $1.8 billion on political activity and lobbying in the US during the 2020 election cycle, according to a new study published by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR). The majority of the money spent by labor, $1.4 billion, came straight from union dues taken from workers who can legally be fired if they refuse to fund union activities[.]

Those two numbers also emphasize the need for even more right-to-work laws, laws that not only allow workers to work for an employer without joining a union whose members also work for that employer, but also allow those non-union workers to decline to pay any form of dues or tribute to that union.

Lies of Our President

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Here are some, via Just the News:

I don’t know anybody, including Larry Summers, who’s a friend of mine, who’s worried about inflation.

But, Summers in particular:

These figures and labor market tightness and the behavior of housing markets and asset prices are all rising in a more concerning way than I worried about a few months ago. This raises my degree of concern about an economic overheating scenario.

…you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

But

…growing number of “breakthrough cases”—those testing positive for the virus after being fully vaccinated—are being reported….

Aside: I say, at this point, that the “growing number” are still a tiny number of occurrences compared to the number of vaccine doses administered, and the even rarer deaths still are, in the main, from comorbidities also present. Further, those breakthrough cases are quite mild compared to the non-vaccinated cases that get serious enough to want medical attention. The vaccines aren’t perfect, but your odds (favorable though they are to begin with, if you’re healthy) are much improved by the vaccines. You’re just not bullet-proof as Biden exaggeratedly implies.

…the drugs that are designed to kill the virus came along so quickly. They’ve been working on it for two decades. There’s nothing quick about this. It’s been over two decades.

This is a cynical distortion of the facts. “They’ve” been working on the underlying mRNA technology for many years. The vaccines are a new application of that technology, aimed in a direction not originally envisioned.

We’ve lost more people in the United States — over 630-some thousand people — than every major war we’ve ever fought in the United States of America. More people have died than all our major wars combined. Think about that.

But:

Civil War alone resulted in a conservatively estimated 620,000 US military deaths, and World War II claimed the lives of more than 400,000….

And we’ve fought a few more wars than just those two. Think about that, indeed.

Again, but: Joe Biden has always been dishonest:

His treatment of then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas and of Anita Hill, a witness against him, was a remarkable display of racism in his treatment of both and of sexism in his treatment of Hill.

He’s never made any bones about not wanting his kids to grow up in a mixed community.

He still pretends he didn’t know what son Hunter was doing in Ukraine.

He still pretends he didn’t know what son Hunter was doing in the People’s Republic of China, despite having traveled there and back with Dad Joe on Air Force Two.

He was quite blunt about his relationship with blacks during his campaign last fall: a black man who doesn’t support him for President isn’t really black.

He still insists, with a straight face, that Georgia’s new voting law, which expands ballot access and strengthens voting security, is Jim Crow on steroids.

He insists that Texas’ voting law is an assault on the very democracy of our nation.

Reverse Roe v Wade?

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That’s part of the goal of an amicus brief being prepared for the Supreme Court for when it takes up the appeal of the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case itself concerns whether Mississippi should be able to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks).

A coalition of approximately 22 pro-life groups and several legislators collected signatures from more than 300 lawmakers in 35 states in support of the brief, ranging from Michigan State Representative Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) to Arkansas State Senator Scott Flippo (R-Bull Shoals).
“We’re hoping to accomplish protecting life within our respective states as best as possible,” [University of Michigan Law School] graduate Jacob Weaver [the lead on the brief] told The Center Square. “Roe v Wade was abundantly unconstitutional. It’s now clear that it’s life in the womb, not potential life.”

Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President, demurs.

Mississippi has said the quiet part out loud. The purpose of its blatantly unconstitutional abortion ban is to have the Supreme Court overrule 50 years of precedent and allow states to ban abortions. This is not what the American people—80% of whom support safe, legal abortion—want, and it would deny essential health care primarily to people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with low incomes.

Her first is both correct and a cynically done exaggeration. Mississippi has, indeed, said a quiet part out loud: that States, not the Federal government—including the Judiciary—should be regulating abortion access and abortions. There is no particular move to ban all abortions, though, except in the minds of a very few, and in the fetid imaginations of hysterical pro-abortionists.

Next, the fact that Roe has lasted 50 years only illustrates the duration of the error; that duration in no way legitimizes the error. Indeed, Roe itself reversed 150 years of precedent in which the Federal government, correctly, played no role in the matter.

Then there’s the business of polling. Johnson has chosen not to cite the poll she claims has produced that result. I’ll leave aside the exposure over the last 5 years of the utter reliability of polls generally. But aside from her claim, she’s assuming “80%” are evenly distributed across all States—or assuming the legitimacy of a Federal, one-size-fits-all status of abortion preference, so that “80%” of California or Illinois should be able to dictate to Mississippi or Texas the outcome, even if “80%” of Mississippians or Texans adamantly disagree.

No, with States in control of their own domestic matters, as our Constitution holds, the citizens of each State would be, as they should, the arbiters of their State’s abortion laws. Each State then will take care of its own minority populations—which would tend to better protect the lives of minority babies otherwise vulnerable to being killed in their mothers’ wombs.

Finally come Johnson’s two dog whistles: that abortion is health care and that LGBTQ+ might be denied access to abortions. Regarding the first whistle, there’s nothing particularly healthful for the babies in their being killed in the womb. Regarding the second shrill whistle, only biology, not “identification,” can make it possible for a member of the LGBTQ+ community even to get pregnant, much less decide subsequently to want to abort her baby.

The rest of the goal of the Michigan amicus is to restore, under the 9th Amendment of our Constitution, that right of individual States to regulate access to abortion and to abortion itself.

“The power to regulate abortion falls squarely into States’ police powers,” as it did for 150 years pre-Roe.
“We argue this depoliticizes the court and that it returns states to their rightful place in the constitutional scheme,” Weaver told The Center Square in a phone interview.

At worst, the Supreme Court should recognize current, realized medical capability. Roe is essentially a technology-based ruling, setting its abortion threshold to the point at which the baby is viable outside the womb—roughly the start of the third trimester at the time of the Roe ruling. Today’s capability brings that viability far earlier in the pregnancy.