Monthly Archives: February 2024

Republican Timidity

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Recall that ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed to individual floor votes on each of the dozen separate appropriations bills. His position, and he was right IMNSHO, was that lumping them all together into a single omnibus spending bill only led to increased Federal government spending by preventing Congressmen from debating and voting on those bills individually—omnibus made the lot of them an all or nothing proposition.

Now Republican House management (they’re not leaders) are skittering away from that commitment. Instead, under the artificial deadline of a government shutdown due to lack of funding (itself a coarse distortion, since the government would only partially shut down, and separately, there is plenty of revenue flowing in under current tax law to fund most of the present government), those Republicans look like they’re preparing to cave and give the Progressive-Democrats everything they want. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R, MN)

confirmed to Fox News Digital that passing minibuses is “on the table” and blamed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) for not working with the House on its individual spending bills.
“Due to the Schumer Senate’s inability to pass individual appropriations bills and the tight timeline we’re working with, all options are on the table including minibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Speaker Johnson’s leadership, the days of massive omnibus bills are behind us.”

No. This is excuse-making for the Republicans’ timidity. This is abject surrender to the Progressive-Democrats. There is no tight timeline—the partial shutdown won’t be a disaster, as prior shutdowns—the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that—have amply demonstrated. To the extent there is any sort of deadline, it’s on the Progressive-Democratic Party for refusing to negotiate spending cuts in any serious fashion and on Schumer for forcing through the Senate an irresponsibly spendthrift bill. And on weak Republican Senators for negotiating so poor a foreign aid and border (in)security bill in the first instance.

And this, from a Republican Congressman who was too timid, or too lacking in moral courage, or both, to allow himself to be identified:

These negotiations are less focused on getting 216 Republicans to vote for them and more on getting the majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats to vote for them, and that concern about voting on all 12 is not going to be as prominent.

This is just a sellout of those commitments.

These managers need to find the courage of the convictions their mouths utter and hold 12 individual floor votes, or they need to get out of the way. These managers currently are on track to make Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) Speaker, by a wide margin, and what a disaster that would be for our republic.

In Which Biden Extends His Betrayal of Israel

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The Biden administration is putting before the UN Security Council an alternative proposal that demands Israel agree a cease fire as soon as practicable and not engage its Rafah ground offensive until, functionally, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden personally approves. Biden’s “alternative” pushes for

a temporary cease-fire in Gaza and states Israel’s planned, major ground offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah “should not proceed under current circumstances.”

No alternative proposal needs to be submitted to the UN Security Council. The US vetoed the proposal put up by Algeria, and that’s all it needs to do, other than then sitting down, shutting up, and staying out of Israel’s way.

The only circumstances under which Biden presently would approve Israel’s move into Rafah to root out and destroy the Hamas terrorist organization holed up there is if Israel were to guarantee no civilians would be harmed in the making of that move. This is an impossible guarantee, and Biden knows that full well.

Agreeing any sort of cease fire at this point would be Israel letting Hamas continue to exist to carry out the thousand October 7s that a Hamas mucky-muck has already publicly promised. The only time when a cease fire would become practicable is when there are no more Hamas terrorists left at which to fire. Biden knows this full well, also.

Joe Biden’s anti-Israel perfidy is abhorrent, and all of us Americans need to remember this in November.

Cowardice or Bigotry?

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Leah Goldstein is a champion road racing cyclist who was invited to be a keynote speaker at Inspire‘s 8 March International Women’s Day confab in Canada.

Goldstein also is an Israeli Defense Force veteran, having served some 30 years ago. For that heinous crime, she was disinvited from the organization’s confab. Apparently, an “extremely vocal group” took issue with her appearing, much less speaking. Inspire justified its…behavior…with this:

Our focus at INSPIRE has been and will always be to create safe spaces to honor, share, and celebrate the remarkable stories of women and nonbinary individuals[.]

But apparently not all women; only those who suit the whims of Inspire‘s managers. Or the whims of those who cowed Inspire‘s managers into this erasure.

It could be, after all, that those managers aren’t really antisemitic bigots. They could be nothing but abject cowards.

I describe, you decide.

Vulnerability of our Electric Grid

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Much is being made, and justifiably so, regarding the lack of capacity of our electricity distribution grid to support growing electricity demands.

…assessments of the national electric grid’s ability to deliver power during peak demand periods, such as heat waves and cold snaps, have shown increasing risk for blackouts.
…
Environmental groups are pushing to transition home heating from natural gas to electricity, and electric vehicles are also adding to the grid’s thirst for power.
Among this mix of increasing electricity needs are data centers.

That’s not our grid’s only set of vulnerabilities, though. Our grid remains vulnerable to EMP strikes, whether high altitude nuclear or more targeted and localized conventionally driven EMPs. Such attacks would be especially destructive since the wiring in the grid would act as a wave guide and feed the pulse into every electronic device connected to the grid, from home computers to those in our financial and data centers, frying those computers. This is…disappointing…in that it would be relatively cheap to harden our grid against EMP (and relatively cheap to harden those computer assets, too, especially the nationally important ones).

An additional vulnerability is cyber attacks against key control nodes in our electricity distribution grid, a vulnerability that continues to be given short shrift by both the Federal and State governments and by the grid-associated utilities. This vulnerability is amply demonstrated by the multiplicity of denial of service attacks, ransomware attacks, hacking-based data thefts, and on and on.

Biden Refuses, Abbott Acts

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Fronton Island is American territory, a Texas island in the Rio Grande near the Texas town of Fronton and across from the Mexican towns of Los Guera and Ciudad Miguel Alemán.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has been refusing to defend our southern border his entire term, and his decision ultimately led to his surrendering Fronton Island and ceding it to Mexican drug cartels. Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham:

This island before it was claimed, was literally a law enforcement free zone for the cartels to do whatever they wanted[.]

Last fall, in an operation little reported on since, Abbott’s administration, in the form of Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham’s Texas Land Office in partnership with Texas’ Department of Public Safety corrected Biden’s utter failure. In an action named Operation Flat Top, elements of the Texas DPS and Texas Military Department swept over the island and seized it, restoring it to American sovereignty (or at least to Texas sovereignty since Biden has so evidently washed his hands of it).

The Texans seized major caches of weapons, explosive devices [and] drugs as they cleared the island (I’m reminded of a prior Progressive-Democratic administration’s Operation Fast and Furious under which that administration peddled firearms to Mexican cartels), then began the process of securing the island with the Biden-hated concertina wire on the Mexico facing side. An additional outcome: Buckingham noted that since Texan sovereignty over the Texas island has been restored there are zero people coming across from Mexico from that part of the border.

We need to remember Biden’s failure refusal to act this fall.