Monthly Archives: November 2021

Cowardice

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Nadia Murad, sold into sex slavery by Daesh when she was 14, escaped that existence and wrote a book about it: The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity (due out next February).

She was scheduled to speak with students from some of the 600 schools that are part of the Toronto District School Board about her book and the life it describes, but her presentation and discussion were canceled by Helen Fisher, one of the board’s Superintendents of Education.

But, according to Fisher’s concerns, the event might actually foster Islamophobia. Because Canadian schoolboys and girls are all a bunch of snowflakes who can’t understand such things. Of course, to the extent that’s actually true, that would be a coarse illustration of what Fisher’s Education facility is turning out.

Tanya Lee, proprietor of a book club for teenage girls, A Room Of Your Own—and mother—had a different take:

This is what Islamic State [Daesh] means. It is a terrorist organisation. It has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims. The TDSB should be aware of the difference.

But apparently Fisher’s terror has clouded her awareness. Indeed, even though a statement put out by the school board’s Director of Education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, claimed to apologize to Murad (and to another, whose event was similarly canceled), the board has not un-canceled or rescheduled Murad’s speaking, even these two-plus weeks later.

Never mind that Murad also is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, UN Goodwill Ambassador, and “a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence.” And that she might know something of her subject and that subject’s implications outside of terrorism.

This isn’t just rank political correctness. This is raw cowardice by the Precious Ones of the Toronto school board.

These are not the Canadians who fought with such courage in WWII. Or only yesterday in Afghanistan.

An Important Point

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Deroy Murdock made one.

Recall that the City Council of New York City is contemplating—seriously—letting noncitizens, all 808,000 of them in New York City, vote in city elections.

Yet, as Murdock emphasized, there is no such thing a as a noncitizen.

Rather than non-citizens, these people are foreign citizens. While they are not American citizens, they remain citizens of the foreign nations from whence they came—Mexico, Haiti, Russia, Singapore, New Zealand, and dozens more.

He went on:

The New York City Council aims to dilute the local votes of American citizens by extending the franchise to 808,000 foreign citizens. This would include letting approximately 117,500 citizens of communist China select the mayors, City Council members, district attorneys, and other officials of America’s most-populous municipality.

Imagine the citizens of our enemy nations selecting who governs us. These elections, so far, are at the local level, but it’s the local levels that are the foundations on which are built that our higher jurisdictions.

It’s at the local level that our ordinances and laws are created—by elected lawmakers that citizens of our enemies have a say in electing. Which gives those foreign citizens a say in the local ordinances and laws that govern us. Those local ordinances and laws are the foundation on which the statutes enacted by our higher jurisdictions are built.

One city, albeit one of our largest, might not seem much of a threat, and it’s not. But it’s more than a start: Progressive-Democrats in other local jurisdictions have already done the deed. They’ve

already empowered foreign citizens to vote for San Francisco school board and in local races in two Vermont cities and 11 Maryland communities.

More Disingenuosity of the Left

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Buried in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill that they’re so desperate to hurry up and get passed before anyone can peruse it is this payoff to unions:

The bill the House passed would allow union members to deduct up to $250 of dues from their tax bills. The deduction is “above the line,” meaning filers can exclude the cost of dues from their gross income. In other words, union dues would get the same treatment now reserved for things like insurance premiums and retirement contributions.

The Progressive-Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, claims it’s no payoff at all; it’s because

Unions are the backbone of the middle class. This legislation would put money back in the pockets of working families.

Never mind that union membership in the entire private sector is only a bit over 6%, not close to any sort of middle class backbone.

What the Progressive-Democrat carefully ignores, too, is that absent the vast increase in taxes included in the reconciliation bill, there’d be no need to put money back in the pockets of working families because that money wouldn’t be leaving those pockets in the first place.

The WSJ has the right of it:

The true goal of the tax break is to fill union coffers by making dues less of a deterrent to joining. The incentive would be particularly strong in 23 states without right-to-work laws, where workers pay partial union fees whether or not they’re members.

(Keep in mind, too, that the Progressive-Democrats also are pushing legislation that would eliminate right-to-work laws in those 23 States and nation-wide.)

Bread and circuses. Vote buying.

Wuhan Virus Deaths and Wuhan Virus Politics

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The Wuhan Virus mortality rate for those of us who are basically healthy is, and has been all along, once we started getting enough data to make such assessments, a pretty constant and small fraction of 1%—out of 1,000 cases, fewer than 5 of us are likely to die.  Fewer yet, if we consider all infections, but the only hard data we have are reported cases, since many with infections either are asymptomatic, and so go unreported, or are sufficiently mild that the individual self-medicates, and so go unreported.

That’s the context against which the politically motivated hype only the total deaths from the virus—some hundreds of thousands. The emotion-laden focus on those deaths ignores the far vaster numbers who’ve gotten sick and recovered: just under 800 thousand vs 38.8 million recovered according to worldometer, as of 25 November. That 2% mortality rate, though, includes all deaths reported from the virus—including the old and those with comorbidities, for whom the mortality rates are far higher than for the general population.

All of which is a long-winded lead-in to this.

There were 220 thousand American deaths attributed to the Wuhan Virus during the fall Presidential campaign last year, and candidate Joe Biden said

Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.

As of the same period this year, in the reign of President Joe Biden (D), 350 thousand Americans have died from the Wuhan Virus.

This comes despite the fact that for most of 2020, we had no vaccines and no proven palliatives against the virus until just about this time frame in 2020, and Biden has had those vaccines and an increasing number of effective—at least to some degree—palliatives, and our doctors and nurses have far more experience in dealing with the virus, for his entire reign.

Biden has declared himself unfit to be President. Biden again:

If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive[.]

Indeed.

Rules Don’t Matter

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The Progressive-Democrats want to toss inconvenient Senate rules so they can have anything they demand. And they’ve become very open about that.

A group of House Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) penned a letter urging the Senate’s Democratic leadership to ignore the Senate Parliamentarian ruling that a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill.

And from the letter,

We do understand that the Senate Parliamentarian has issued a memorandum dismissing—despite evidence to the contrary—the budgetary impact of providing a pathway to citizenship. But the role of the Parliamentarian is an advisory one, and the Parliamentarian’s opinion is not binding.

Never mind the carefully unsubstantiated claim of budgetary impact. Consider the demand that the Parliamentarian’s ruling be blithely ignored. It is an advisory ruling, but under Senate reconciliation ruling it is binding, and the Senate is bound by it.

Sure, the ruling can be overridden, but that capability is irrelevant, as the Progressive-Democrats know full well. Statutes are binding, also, as are Federal agency regulations, and statutes and regulations also can be overridden: by subsequent statute or regulation, by the issuing agency rescinding its regulation, by the courts overruling or striking altogether the statute or regulation.

But overrule it the damned thing, Progressive-Democrats demand; it’s inconvenient to their purpose.

Nor will such disregard be limited to immigration. They’ll move to ignore any Senate rule, any regulation, any statute that gets in their way.

The Progressive-Democrats, in their drive to “fundamentally transform our nation,” now are saying out loud that a Critical Item in their desired transformation is that we should no longer be a nation ruled by law, but a nation ruled by men and women—their men and women in particular.

Remember this next fall, and keep it firmly in mind for 2024.