Monthly Archives: July 2021

Cowards Flee

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have done it again. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called a special session of the Texas legislature because Texas’ Progressive-Democrats cravenly ran away from the last days of the legislature’s regular session explicitly to deny a quorum and prevent debate and votes to pass or reject a number of critical bills, including a couple of voting bills that would increase ballot security while facilitating voter access to ballots.

These wonders of Progressivism were too cowardly and too arrogant (with all the overlap between the two) to debate and vote—even to allow debate and voting. So much for their pious pretense of favoring voting.

Now, those same Progressive-Democrats have blown up the special session, wasting all the Texas taxpayer money spent on that special session, and run away again.

And they bragged about their cowardice. James Talarico (D, 52nd District), among the Progressive-Democrats who jetted out of the state on a chartered jet:

Just landed in Memphis on our way to DC. Thank y’all for your well wishes.

They showed their privilege again, too: they chartered private jets in which to flee to DC; they couldn’t even be bothered to fly commercial, or to take the train, or (gasp!) drive themselves.

Rich cowards fleeing.

Some did jump on a bus, though.

Others were reportedly pictured on a DC-bound bus with packs of Miller Lite.

Not even a Texas beer, even if it is a Dallas Cowboys sponsor; that just shows the Precious Ones’ virtue signaling. Miller is sold by Chicago, IL, headquartered Molson Coors. These wonders couldn’t even be bothered to bring packs of Shiner Bock or Texas Red.

Party down, guys. In every sense of that phrase.

Oh, and one more thing. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s leadership has already termed the filibuster a relic of Jim Crow. Here is that party–the Party that invented Jim Crow–by running away, reviving this relic. And they’re proud of it.

Washington State and Abortion

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Washington passed a law—SB6219—that mandates all health coverage policies issued in that State provide (and charge for) coverage for abortions, with no exceptions whatsoever, including no exceptions for religious belief regarding life and conception. Under SB6219, no insurer can offer a policy that does not include abortion coverage.

Leave aside the cynical claim by Washington’s lawyers that

its no-exception abortion coverage mandate in health plans does not necessarily require health plans to include abortion coverage.

Leave aside that the Supreme Court has already ruled—repeatedly—that religious exceptions and conscience exceptions must be included in any such law.

The Cedar Park Church, in Bothell near Seattle, is challenging that law in Cedar Park Assembly of Kirkland v Kreidler (Kreidler is Myron Kreidler, Washington’s Insurance Commissioner; Jay Inslee, Washington’s Governor, also is a defendant. Both are defendants in their official capacities); the case currently is before the 9th Circuit.

What really jumps out at me, though, is this assertion by the State [emphasis added]:

The state lawyer emphasized what the church didn’t allege: “no carrier” would offer a plan consistent with its beliefs, it sought such a plan from other carriers, or that the state rejected a submitted plan.

On what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private enterprise’s business decision?

More importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private citizen’s medical decision that should only involve that citizen and his doctor and secondarily (with no tertiary) his health coverage provider?

Most importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority to allow a baby to be killed before it’s born?

The answer to each of those questions is that there is no legitimate basis for such claims.

Jokey-Doke

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Because it’s time, again….

Two men are going golfing, when one stops by the pro shop…
“I need to get a sleeve of balls, you want me to pick you up some?”
“No thanks. I just need this one.”
“Just one ball? What if you hit it deep into the woods?”
“Well, it makes a whistle after you hit it. Can’t lose it. I only need this one.”
“What is its dark and you hit it into a sand trap?”
“Well, it glows in the dark. Can’t lose it. I only need this one.”
“What if you hit it into the water? You’ll never find it.”
“Well, it floats. I’m telling you, you can’t lose it. I only need this one.”
“Wow. That’s some ball. Where’d you get it?”
“Oh, I found it.”

This is my step ladder. I never knew my real ladder.

A duck is standing next to a busy road, cars zooming past while he waits for a break in traffic. A chicken walks up to him and says, “Don’t do it, man. You’ll never hear the end of it.”

My grandmother’s last words before she kicked the bucket were, “Hey, how far do you think I can kick this bucket?”

Why can’t dinosaurs clap? Because they’re dead.

Why do scuba divers fall backwards out of the boat? Because if they fell forward, they’d still be in the boat.

Why does a chicken coop have two doors? If it had four it would be a chicken sedan.

A man walks into a bar and sees a bunch of people waiting to get refreshments. He asks the bartender, “Is this really the punch line?”

As I get older, and I remember all the people I’ve lost along the way, I think to myself, maybe a career as a tour guide wasn’t for me.

And finally, an oldie but goodie for the woke teachers:

A teacher was teaching her class about whales.
She said that it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human being as even though it was a gigantic animal, its stomach was very small. A little girl put up her hand and said that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated, the teacher insisted that a whale couldn’t possibly swallow a human. The little girl said, “When I get to Heaven, I’ll ask Jonah.”
The teacher replied, “What if Jonah went to Hell?”
The girl said: “Then you ask him.”

Student Debt Problems

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Students who borrowed (lots of) money to get degrees from “elite” schools—or from any school, come to that—now feel financially hobbled for life.

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.

The universities share a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems. These schools should—and the reluctant should be required to—publish the mean and median salaries for each of the first five years of employment for each of the majors the schools offer. The schools also should be the ones making the loans to their students or underwriting private lenders’ loans to their students.

The Federal government shares a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems, also. The government should stop throwing money at the schools; that just encourages them to increase their tuition price to absorb the Federal dollars—at the immediate and direct expense to the students. Indeed, the Federal government should stop shipping money to the schools at all except for narrowly defined basic research projects, and those exceptions should be rare.

However, color me unsympathetic to the student borrowers’ plight; they bear the greatest responsibility for their situation. No one made them borrow such outlandish amounts. Even when I was in school the wage, etc, data were available; I just had to get off the couch to go get them. Today, it’s not even necessary to get off the couch: the pupils just have to bestir themselves enough to engage in some key clicks on their computerized device.

I’m especially unsympathetic to the students’ blame-shifting.

Matt Black graduated from Columbia in 2015 with an MFA in film and $233,000 in federal loans. …
Mr Black, a 36-year-old writer and producer in Los Angeles, said he grew up in a lower middle-class family in Oklahoma. He earns $60,000 in a good year and less than half that in dry stretches. The faculty at Columbia was stellar, he said, but he blamed the school for his “calamitous financial situation.”

Black needs to get a mirror and consult it. He was no child newly graduated from high school, blindly accepting the putative guidance counselor’s advice when he decided to take those loans. He was a grown adult man looking at graduate schools (he did shop around, looking at more than just Columbia, didn’t he?). No one made him take “the school’s” unvarnished word; no one made him not check for himself whether borrowing so much against a future salary he so easily could have learned was a good idea. No one made him take the loans. Indeed, no one made him decide to go to such an expensive school for his film MFA.

Some of Biden’s and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s Racism Stymied

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At least temporarily. Recall the American Rescue Plan Act which the Progressive-Democratic Party rammed through on strict party lines via reconciliation and that President Joe Biden (D) happily signed into law. That law

allows for automatic loan forgiveness up to 120% of the federal loan for farmers or ranchers who are “socially disadvantaged,” which is defined as “Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic, or Asian, or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

It’s hard to get any more blatantly racist than that: it explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, barring Americans of the wrong race from participating at all in the program.

Union City, TN, farmer Robert Holman had sued the USDA, as administrator of the loan forgiveness program, on the basis of that blatant, intrinsic program racism. Last week, US District Judge S Thomas Anderson, Chief Judge of the Western District of Tennessee, issued an injunction against the USDA blocking it from issuing any forgivenesses until the case has made its way all the way through the courts and likely appeals.

Southeastern Legal Foundation General Counsel Kimberly Hermann, whose firm was one of two representing farmer Holman, has most of the right of it:

The Biden administration uses equity as a license to punish Americans—here farmers—because of their skin color. The Court’s order sends a clear message to President Biden that racially exclusive programs, whether on a farm or in a school, are unconstitutional.

Biden didn’t act alone on this, though. As noted above, the Progressive-Democratic Party—acting alone in Congress—passed the bill that Biden signed. His appointees in the Ag Department enthusiastically tried to act on that racism.

Heads up, though, and here’s the rest of the right of it: an injunction is only temporary and will be superseded by the district court’s final ruling. That ruling then will stand or fall on appeal, and the Biden administration’s and Progressive-Democrat-run Congress’ bigotry ultimately will be blocked or restored by the final appellate ruling.