Monthly Archives: October 2021

More Biden, et al., Disingenuousity

Posted on by
Reply

On the matter of raising our nation’s debt ceiling, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) and the Republican caucus in the Senate have been crystalline for months: Progressive-Democrats in both the House and the Senate have the votes to raise the debt ceiling by themselves, and they have the responsibility to do that, given their decision to pass spending bills with no Republican input, without even talking to Republicans in any serious fashion to seek their input on spending.

Now comes President Joe Biden (D).

He called on Republicans to “get out of the way” and let Democrats quickly raise the debt limit. Asked whether he could guarantee that the US would be able to raise the debt ceiling before the deadline, he put the onus on Republicans: “No, I can’t. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.”

Of course, it’s impossible for the Republicans, being the minority party in both houses of Congress, to be in the way in any shape or form. They can’t stop the Progressive-Democrats from raising the debt ceiling; they don’t have the votes.

All that’s required is for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and his Progressive-Democrat caucus, along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) with her Progressive-Democrat majority, to move the raise along through reconciliation—either as a stand-alone bill or by each house passing the extant reconciliation bill, then adding the debt ceiling raise during Conference Committee discussions. Bills coming out of Conference are passable via simple majority votes—no Senate filibusters on Conference-agreed bills.

The latter move, in particular, would let Schumer put Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) on the spot, forcing them to choose between reneging on their pious promises to not vote for a $3.5 trillion bill they say is too much to spend all at once and whose breadth of content they say is too broad in order to vote for a debt ceiling raise, or sticking to their promises and thereby vote down the debt ceiling raise.

Nor would that jeopardize a subsequent clean debt ceiling raise bill, should Manchin and Sinema prove themselves good for their promises: the Senate’s Parliamentarian has already said that the Senate’s two reconciliation bills per session limit would not be applicable. A third bill, dedicated to passing a debt ceiling raise, could be done functionally as reconciliation by “modifying” the second reconciliation bill.

Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi know all of this full well. They’re just trying to duck their personal and Party responsibilities.

It’s a Start

Posted on by
1

And it’s coming from a county school board in North Carolina.

A North Carolina county school board has passed a policy that will discipline or fire teachers who undermine the US Constitution, tell students that American historical figures weren’t heroes or portray racism as systemic in America.
The vote Friday by the Johnston County school board is part of a larger campaign to stamp out critical race theory from American schools.

This is a critical start, even if it did come only after the County’s Board of Commissioners had threatened to withhold $7.9 million until the school board acted.

The next step is to include in the curriculum an emphasis on a number of aspects of the shameful acts of our history that really did occur, unlike the…nonsense…in the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory:

  • It was the Democratic Party that demanded slavery in one of “their” new States for every free State admitted to our nation during the run-up to our Civil War
  • It was the Democratic Party that took “their” States out of our nation and forced that Civil War
  • It was the Democratic Party that, in the aftermath of that Civil War, produced the KKK to keep freed blacks “in their place,” lynching and otherwise murdering those and their white supporters who didn’t “mind their place”
  • It was the Democratic Party that, in the aftermath of that Civil War, pushed for gun controls explicitly to keep freed blacks unarmed and helpless against their KKK
  • It was the Democratic Party that enacted Jim Crow laws to keep black Americans from being able to vote
  • It was the Democratic Party that pushed for, and enforced in “their” States, segregation
  • It was the Democratic Party that pushed for minimum wage laws in order to keep southern black Americans from moving north and earning a living by competing for jobs on the basis of the pay they’d require for their labor

In today’s current event lessons, it’s also necessary to emphasize continuing aspects of our history:

  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that still push for gun controls, with those controls’ disparate impact on minorities’—blacks’ in particular—ability to defend themselves
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that push to defund police departments, so no one else—particularly government—can defend them, either
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that are reviving segregation by pushing identity politics
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that, in a back door Jim Crow move, are pushing to defeat or rescind already enacted voting laws that both make it easier to vote—particularly for minorities—and make the voting more secure

These aspects of our history, and the players involved, are too often glossed over in our grade school history lessons, in our junior high history and civics lessons, and in high school.

Essential Services

Posted on by
Reply

A Florida bill is starting to make inroads on defining what services are essential in an emergency.

State Senator Jason Brodeur (R, Sanford) filed Senate Bill 254 on September 17. It stipulates that “emergency orders may not expressly prohibit religious institutions from regular religious services or activities.”
On Thursday, state Representative Nick DiCeglie (R, Indian Rocks Beach) filed a House companion, House Bill 215, which reiterates that an emergency lockdown or shutdown order must apply equally across businesses and religious institutions.

The bill, a shockingly concise one-pager, says

An emergency order…may not expressly prohibit a religious institution from conducting regular religious services or activities. However, a general provision in an emergency order which applies uniformly to all entities in the affected jurisdiction may be applied to a religious institution if the provision is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

I’ll go them one further. Keeping our economy open and running is an essential service. Unless bombs are falling, there is no emergency that justifies shutting down, damaging our economy, destroying businesses, destroying livelihoods, even lives.

On the contrary, an open and operating economy is the best means of dealing with the emergency because that keeps operational the ability to generate the weal and mechanisms necessary to bring the emergency quickly and efficiently to a favorable conclusion.

 

The bill can be read here (the bill actually spills onto a second page by one line).

Importance of Some Wuhan Virus Vaccination Side Effects

Posted on by
Reply

According to the Federal Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there are

569,294 adverse event reports associated with COVID-19 vaccination in the US, with a total of 2,433,730 symptoms reported.

Also reported is that

391 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been given in the US to 185 million people. It’s estimated about 56% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Among the adverse events/symptoms reported are some 34,589 folks getting the Wuhan Virus after having been vaccinated.

What’s carefully omitted from “journalist” reporting of these outcomes is their context—the specific relationship between the numbers of these events/symptoms and the numbers of vaccinated.

Adverse events work out to 0.14% of doses administered, and total symptoms represent 0.6% of doses administered.

Those 56% of Americans who are fully vaccinated are 184,852,416 Americans. Even if we take those 570,000 adverse events and 2.4 million symptoms as being solely allocated to fully vaccinated (which is a boundary value, not the actual distribution of events/symptoms), those per centages work out to 0.3% and 1.3% of fully vaccinated, respectively.

Those extremely tiny rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes are in line with, if not smaller than, the rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes for other vaccines and antibiotics that are routinely prescribed.

Now consider those 34,000 infections despite having been vaccinated. Assuming the boundary condition of those infections occurring despite having been fully vaccinated, that works out to a 99.98% effectiveness of the vaccines. Compare that rate with the rates on which the vaccines were, sort of, approved by the FDA: 95% for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna two-dose vaccines, and 65% for the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccines.

It’s also becoming increasingly established that vaccinated folks who get the Wuhan Virus infection experience weaker symptoms, have lower hospitalization rates, and are even less likely to die than those who are unvaccinated and catch the virus.

With a lethality rate for the unvaccinated of less than a half per cent for healthy folks younger than ~65 and in the 2-5% range for those older, folks should weigh the likelihood of an uncomfortable-to-bad outcome and decide. Folks of any age with one or more comorbidities should weigh very seriously the relative odds.

Especially given the weaker symptoms after vaccination, I still recommend it, even though the vaccine only improves already highly favorable odds: it’s no fun being sick.

Siding with the Extremists

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) not only advised his Progressive-Democrats in the House to hold off on trying to pass the “infrastructure” bill. This is the bill, remember, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had so solemnly promised the more moderate members of Party she would bring to the floor for a vote on 27 Sept. Then after breaking that promise, she promised to have the vote on 29 Sept, then promised 30 Sept, then 1 Oct, then canceled the vote altogether, for a total of four solemn cynical promises broken.

No, that wasn’t all for Biden. He then made his own promise late Friday to the House Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in a closed door meeting in one of their House conference rooms. The “infrastructure” bill

ain’t going to happen until we reach an agreement on the next piece of legislation[.]

That next piece of legislation is the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill he and his fellows are so anxious to get enacted.

With that commitment, Biden repeated and renewed the promise he made last June to not sign the “infrastructure” bill until he also had his reconciliation bill on his desk. With that renewed commitment, Biden broke earlier, campaign and inauguration speech promises to unite our nation and to govern in a bipartisan manner.

Biden has, instead, openly and irretrievably united with the most progressive of the Progressive-Democrats—the extreme Left of a Party that already has gone far Left.