Monthly Archives: October 2022

Here’s a Thought

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Take a breath. I have those once in a while.

Anyway.

The Biden administration has just sent $530 million to two (count ’em, two) companies in deep Progressive-Democratic (I won’t say “blue;” that sullies the term used to describe our State and local police forces) Massachusetts so they can make batteries for battery-powered vehicles.

Ascend Elements and 6K Inc were recipients Wednesday [19 October] of more than $530 million in federal funding through a program designed to support battery manufacturing, recycling, and material processing for the electric vehicle market.

Massachusetts Progressive-Democrat Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren and Congressmen Jim McGovern and Seth Moulton all think the taxpayer money transfer is just peachy-keen.

Which brings me to my thought. The money has flowed. When the new Congressional session begins, Ascend and 6K will have had 2½ months by which to have committed at least some of that money. Of course, as serious companies, they already have had a year, or two, or more in which to plan their use of all that taxpayer money as they lobbied for it with their Massachusetts Congressional delegation.

If the Republican Party wins a majority in the House, and especially if it wins a majority in the Senate also, then by the end of January 2023, they should hale Mike O’Kronley and Andrew Aberdale, Ascend’s CEO and CFO respectively, before the relevant committees to testify, under oath, concerning the disposition of those moneys so far, and the concrete results obtained with those expenditures. The two should appear on the same day, but in separate committees, cycling through all of them separately so as to be unable to coordinate their responses in real time.

The same should be done with Aaron Bent and Gary Hall, 6K’s CEO and CFO, respectively.

Following that, House auditors to visit the two companies to audit their performance under the contracts. Such testimony and auditing subsequently should be done annually.

It’s a new concept—Congress exercising its oversight responsibility by actually monitoring private contractor performance rather than just paying lip service to the obligation—but it’s one that needs to be put into effect.

Progressive-Democratic Party Payback?

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Or is it Big Tech payback? Or both?

Recall Elon Musk’s renewed commitment to buy Twitter, and recall also his commitment to free speech and to ending Twitter’s bias and censorship.

Now the Biden administration is “reviewing” the proposal for its national security implications.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine—he said it had cost him $80 million so far—and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

Of course there was no threat to stop the Ukraine-Starlink facility; Musk only said he wasn’t sure he could continue to cover the cost alone. The Biden administration objected to the idea of no longer having that freebie.

How dare Musk propose peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. That’s President Joe Biden’s (D) and SecState Antony Blinken’s (D) job. Private citizens should just sit down and shut up.

How dare Musk put together an international consortium to buy a company with global reach? Neither Progressive-Democrats nor the Precious Ones of Twitter approve.

Need to do that “security” evaluation.

Courts and (Public) Opinion

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In a letter in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal, Walter Smith claims to have argu[ed] several cases personally before the Supreme Court (“claims,” because unlike many Letter writers, his signature block makes no mention of his status as a lawyer, past or present), and he expressed considerable dismay over the basis of Court decisions and subsequent Court “legitimacy.”

The court’s majority has made clear that it doesn’t care about public opinion or many of the harmful consequences of its decisions.

I have to wonder how many cases Smith won before the Supreme Court, with such a breathtaking lack of understanding of the Supreme Court’s—of any American court’s—role, an understanding any first year law student gains.

The Court’s role is not to wave to and fro with the winds of public opinion, but to rule on what the Constitution and the statute(s) before the Court say.

Full stop.

That’s why judges and Justices have lifetime appointments—deliberately to insulate them from public opinion, and from politics altogether.

But Smith wasn’t done.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Indeed. But that was Politician Lincoln, not Judge Lincoln. If Smith doesn’t like the Court’s rulings, his beef is with the political branches of our republican government, the men and women of which wrote the laws the Court must apply.

I suggest he begin his remedial training on the American legal system by writing our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, 100 times on his blackboard.

Revisionist History

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Karl Rove, in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, identified a number of Progressive-Democratic Party candidates running for office in the current mid-terms who deny their own words in the nearby past.

Those politicians are Robert Francis O’Rourke, who denies his words favoring defunding—even dismantling—police and police departments; John Fetterman, who calls reminders that he said we could reduce our prison population by a third and not make anyone less safe just lies; Mandela Barnes, who called critiques of his wanting to defund the police just lies; and Raphael Warnock, who called criticisms of his Ebenezer Baptist Church’s attempts to evict tenants who were late on their rent payments due to the straits the Wuhan Virus situation put them into—you guessed it—just lies.

Fetterman’s “memory failure” could well be an outcome of his stroke, which makes his medical fitness for office highly questionable.

O’Rourke, Barnes, and Warnock do not have that excuse. They’re just lying, and with their lies, they’re insulting the intelligence of us average Americans. And by that are unfit for office.

Apologies

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Elliot Kaufman had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that talked about the utility of apologies from Stanford University and the various failures of that school in its serial mistreatment of Jews along with the several machinations the school used to push that mistreatment.

I’m less interested in apologies from schools like Stanford than I am in changes in the schools’ behavior.

Such changes, though, won’t be possible without a complete turnover in school management, from the President/Chancellor/what-have-you on down through middle management, along with removal/replacement of Department Chairs and their seconds, and elimination of frivolous departments like the plethora of DEI and related claptrap.

Absent that—all of that—words of apology will only be, can only be, empty chit-chat and cynical distraction from the problem.