Monthly Archives: January 2023

Jim Crow 2.0, Deprecated

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The Just the News lede tells the tale after President Joe Biden’s (D) widely spread conspiracy theory.

A full 0% of black voters in Georgia report having a “poor” experience voting in the 2022 midterms, a notable showing after several years of Democratic politicians arguing that the state is working to suppress black votes.

The University of Georgia’s School of Public & International Affairs ran a poll:

Among black voters, more than 72% said “excellent,” 23% said “good,” just under 9% said “fair,” and 0% said “poor.”

Will Biden or anyone in his syndicate apologize for his smear?

Nah. Suggesting that would be carrying conspiracy theories to ridiculous extremes.

In Which I Disagree with the Congresswoman

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Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R, SC) has come out in opposition of the move to bar Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

I think we have to be very careful about what we are as a constitutional republic. I am not a fan of Ilhan Omar. She’s an anti-Semite. She’s a bigot. She’s a racist. She’s a socialist. But that doesn’t mean that we cancel people in this country. Republicans don’t stand for cancel culture. And that’s essentially what this is.

And

I think it sets a very dangerous precedent. And you know, there’s so much anti-Semitism in this country. We should be condemning it right and left as we always have, but there’s also the First Amendment right to do that[.]

Mace is correct that we’re a constitutional republic with a First Amendment right for all Americans to speak their piece, whatever that piece might be.

However.

Omar wouldn’t be barred from all House committees, any more than Congressmen Adam Schiff (D, CA) and Eric Swalwell (D, CA) are barred from all House committees. They’re barred only from the House Intelligence Committee; they’re free to serve on other House committees.

Omar would be barred only from the Foreign Affairs Committee and remain free to serve on other House committees. Omar’s rank bigotry makes her presence on Foreign Affairs counterproductive; her presence would give the lie to our nation’s international efforts to counter bigotry.

Our First Amendment free speech rights are limited in certain narrow circumstances. Military members cannot speak counter to military policy while in uniform or in other situations where they can be understood to be speaking for the military or for their branch or for their particular unit. They can be subject to discipline if they do. They can speak as freely as they wish on whatever subject they wish when they’re speaking as private citizens.

When Omar espoused her bigotry, she too often spoke as a Congresswoman, not as a private citizen. It would be entirely correct to bar her from Foreign Affairs; it would be cancel culture only were she barred from all House committees.

South Dakota’s Purity Caucus

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The State’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, is being taken to task for—supposedly—overstepping State constitutional bounds in the way her executive branch agencies propose legislation and introduce it into the legislature.

South Dakota’s very own Purity Freedom Caucus is claiming that those agencies

“overstepped their authority” by exploiting a loophole in the state lawmaking process that allows agencies to introduce bills without a legislative sponsor….

In the present case, South Dakota’s Department of Labor and Regulations submitted two bills to the State’s House Commerce and Energy Committee, and the committee’s chairman then sent the bills directly to the House floor rather than first having it processed by his committee—debate and vote.

Congresswoman Tina Mulally (R), treasurer of the legislature’s Freedom Caucus, complained that all of this circumvents the power of the legislature, and

The governor and the executive agencies seem to conveniently forget we have three branches of government, not one[.]

There are a number of things about this. One is that the Caucus beef in the particular case is with the Commerce and Energy Committee chairman, not any entity in the Executive Branch. It was the committee chairman’s decision to skip the committee process, not that of anyone in the DLR.

Another is that South Dakota, indeed, has three branches of government, and they’re coequal; the Executive is not subordinate (nor superior) to the Legislative. Furthermore, the State’s legislature still has to act on the proposed legislation—to shelve it or debate it, and if debating, then to shelve it or vote it up or down. Nothing in the State’s constitution says otherwise.

But the largest thing is the internally contradictory business about executive agencies overstepping their authority by exploiting a loophole. If there is a loophole, there are no related boundaries. That’s pretty tautological.

If members of the self-identified Freedom Caucus doesn’t like the loophole being used, they should move to close it rather than whine about its being used.

“Society’s” Needs

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Linn-Mar Community School Board (the district is on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, IA) member Rachel Wall thinks she knows more about what “society’s needs” are and what should be taught “society’s” children than those children’s parents do. She posted—and she was deadly serious—on Facebook

The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community[.]

That got her enough public pushback, including calls for her resignation, that Wall added a post that she actually insisted was clarifying:

This post has garnered much ire and although I thought the sentiment was clear, it is obvious that’s not the case. Please allow me to clarify. This post doesn’t say that parents don’t matter or that students don’t matter. It doesn’t say that parents shouldn’t be involved or that students shouldn’t be our focus. What it says is that public education is an ecosystem.

Public education is an ecosystem. And she gets to define who the members of her ecosystem are. They plainly do not include the parents. Parents are not, in her exalted view, part of society. Notice, too, that while Wall doesn’t say that parents and students don’t matter, she also doesn’t say that they do matter.

She’ll hear politely what parents say, and then she’ll proceed without further regard. Children are not to be educated, they’re merely tools with which Wall and her cronies intend to mold their version of community. That status as mere tool, of course, makes the children her focus. Who uses a tool without focusing on it?

Please allow me to clarify. Parents are society. Their children are tomorrow’s society. No one is better suited to determine the needs of society today and tomorrow than society’s members: parents today and tomorrow and today’s children grown into tomorrow.

All teachers are qualified to teach is the mechanics of how to operate in society—STEM materials—how we got here—the facts of history—and how we’ll interact with each other—political history and current civics.

Sadly, dangerously, teachers of Wall’s ilk are unqualified even for that, and district managers like Wall are unqualified for anything related to our children.

The Tax Cut that Isn’t

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Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic (formally, Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor) governor, Tim Walz, is proposing a “tax cut” of up to $2,600 for Minnesotans. His plan calls for income tax credits, paid in the form of checks to recipients rather than reductions in taxes owed at tax filing time, for Minnesotans. The checks would be for

$2,000 for families with incomes below $150,000, and $1,000 for single filers making less than $75,000. They would be exempt from federal taxes. Taxpayers could also get an additional $200 for each dependent—up to three.

But only for some Minnesotans. Those of whom Walz and his government cronies disapprove, those earning more than those income caps would get…nothing. They’re the ones who will be paying those checks with their tax remittals.

If Walz, et al., were truly interested in a tax cut, those wonders would push for an across the board income tax rate reduction.

But, no—leave it to a Progressive-Democratic Party politician to masquerade an income redistribution scheme as a tax cut.