Monthly Archives: June 2024

Pushed into Buying?

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Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys in his Delaware trial over whether he falsified gun purchasing papers pursuant to purchasing a gun are now claiming that Biden was pushed into buying a lethal weapon.

The defense team also tried to paint gun store employee Gordon Cleveland as a pushy salesman who wanted Hunter to walk out with a firearm that day.
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“A sale is a sale and that was their goal that day,” [lead defense attorney Abbe] Lowell said. “They wanted it done quickly.”

This is so obviously a crock that it seems to me Lowell already is setting up grounds for an incompetent counsel appeal.

Hunter Biden is, and he was at the time, a fully grown, rational human being. He wasn’t even high on drugs at the time he chose to buy the gun, Lowell insists. (That latter business about not being high would seem to be irrelevant, since the presiding judge already has ruled that the prosecution does not need to prove Biden was high at the time of his purchase.)

No one stuck a gun in Biden’s ear and forced him to make the buy. Whether the salesman was a high pressure salesman doesn’t matter. Countless Americans face high pressure salesmen countless times in countless venues, and the vast majority of them aren’t persuaded.

No, Hunter Biden acted on his own initiative to make the purchase. When he crossed the street to enter the gun store in the first place, he already was disposed to buy a gun.

Minimum Wage Law Consequence

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Recall that California has enacted one of the highest minimum wage laws in the nation, a $20/hr minimum wage inflicted on fast food restaurants operating in the State.

Now come the consequences, which any schoolboy limited to an allowance could have predicted.

Rubio’s Coastal Grill, a California Mexican restaurant chain, announced the closure of 48 restaurants in the Golden State amid rising business costs.

That’s one-third of the chain’s total operational restaurants in the Southwest, including a few left in California.

Earlier, in anticipation of the labor cost explosion, Red Lobster auctioned off—moved out of—5 California locations, albeit these were among a total of 50 nationwide of which the chain was divesting itself.

In other moves to cut labor costs, Pizza Hut franchises, especially Southern California Pizza Co, has discontinued most delivery services from its California-based restaurants, laying off nearly a thousand drivers.

Can Progressive-Democrats anywhere understand that a high minimum wage requirement—or a requirement at any level—prices unskilled job holders and unskilled job seekers out of those jobs? Can they understand that a wage at any level is vastly superior to no wage at all?

Or is it that Progressive-Democrats are cynical enough to seek to transfer unskilled workers out of jobs where they can gain experience, skills, second incomes, and upward economic mobility and into dependency on Government welfare—where they would represent votes to keep the handouts coming?

Open Border Made Official

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has issued an Executive Order that would allow—apparently not require—him to close our southern border when the number of illegal aliens crossing our border exceeds 2,500 per day, averaged over a week’s time. The closure, if it’s done at all, would end when the number of illegals crossing drops below 1,500 per day, averaged over a week’s time. Biden doesn’t seem to have offered any serious means of enforcing those limits, however, including any mechanism for removing the “excess” illegal aliens from our nation.

It’s important to note, too, that those numbers seem not to include gotaways or those not encountered at all but known only by the traces they leave in the crossing.

With this EO, Biden is attempting to codify the entry into our nation of 500,000+ illegal aliens to just under a million illegal aliens per year.

This is Biden’s active erasure of our southern border, and it wholly ignores our even more porous, and increasingly used by illegal aliens, northern border.

It’s also a demonstration of the lie that is Biden’s claim that no one is above the law. Clearly, Biden considers those 500,000 to a million illegal aliens to be above the law.

We average Americans need to keep this in mind in November.

A Misapprehension

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This one, increasingly unsurprisingly, comes from The Wall Street Journal‘s “news” room. This is the lede from the outlet’s Monday article centered on the 11th Circuit’s decision blocking a Venture Firm’s Grant Program for Black Women:

A federal appeals court on Monday blocked Atlanta-based investment firm Fearless Fund from continuing with a contest that grants awards to businesses owned by Black women, a blow against diversity and inclusion programs that have been under increasing legal attack.

No. It’s actually a blow against segregationist programs that have been under increasing legal attack.

TIFIFY.

Selection on the basis of race or gender rather than merit, as this “venture firm” attempted to do, is intrinsically racist and sexist. Fearless‘ lawyer, Jason Schwartz, in his dismay over the ruling, had this:

The discrimination in access to funding that the Fearless Foundation seeks to address is long-standing and irrefutable[.]

That argument merely adds to the weight of the majority decision: adding discrimination to existing discrimination (stipulating arguendo that Schwartz’ claimed prior is true) merely adds to the discrimination. Further, Shwartz’ argument begins by tacitly acknowledging the inherent racism and sexism of that “existing” discrimination. Schwartz is either disingenuous or broadly oblivious.

Judge Kevin Newsom, writing for the majority, agrees, albeit somewhat more circumlocutorily:

“The fact remains, though, that Fearless simply—and flatly—refuses to entertain applications from business owners who aren’t ‘black females'[.]” If that warranted protection under the First Amendment, “then so would be every act of race discrimination.”

Even the court’s lone dissenter in the decision had no argument against the ruling itself; Judge Robin Rosenbaum argued only that the plaintiff had no standing to bring the case in the first place.

It’s pretty instructive to note that what those so enthusiastically pushing for solutions like Fearless‘; college/university affirmative programs, which also push favoring one group at the expense of others solely on race or sex; et al., miss is that while the problem they claim to want to address is real, the solution lies at the bottom: equal opportunity in the formative years of our children so they enter adult life on an equal footing. Top down solutions, which really are after the fact and too late solutions, don’t accomplish anything other than continued racist and sexist segregation.

That last is a milieu where the Left’s precious mantra of middle out and bottom up actually could have serious effect.

There’s a Hint There

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The farm bill just passed out of the House Agriculture Committee contains a provision barring the Secretary of Agriculture from increasing, on his own alleged authority, SNAP spending above the amounts provided for in the legislation:

[c]orrects egregious Executive branch overreach and disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits.

Austin Scott (R, GA):

The Farm Bill includes protective language that prevents extreme changes to SNAP benefits without Congressional input and continues the cost-neutral status that the TFP [Thrifty Food Plan] has maintained for over 40 years.

The Progressive-Democrat Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed, though, that

the proposal would amount to a roughly $27 billion cut to SNAP[.]

This is the AgSec’s confession that he fully intended to spend—on his own and without any Congressional spending authority to do so—at least those $27 billion above his authorized level. He’s not alone in this. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo (D, CO):

…it is necessary that we go back to the negotiating table and remove this provision[.]

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI):

It…does not have the votes to pass on the House floor. And certainly not in the Senate[.]

This is the budgeting and spending paradigm of the Progressive-Democratic Party: Congressional appropriations and allocations are mere suggestions, and they are to be disregarded whenever inconvenient to Party. After all, it’s only your and my money they’re spending.

There’s an election coming up. Maybe us average Americans should vote our tax dollars.