Monthly Archives: November 2024

An “Apology”

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Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said on The View a few days ago that

Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women. Ever. It’s just that simple. They’re intimidating to him. He doesn’t like to be challenged by them and, you know, Nikki Haley will call him on his nonsense with reproductive rights and how he sees and treats and talks about women. I mean, he just can’t have her around.

Cuban spoke from his heart when he said that.

Some of those not strong or intelligent women around Trump are Nikki Haley (yes, that Nikki Haley), former Trump ambassador to the UN; Arkansas Governor Sara Huckabee Sanders (R), his former Press Secretary; Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager; Kayleigh McEneny, his last Press Secretary; Senator Marsha Blackburn (R,TN); Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY); and on through the millions of American women of all stripes, single mothers to business owners and executives, who support him in the hustings.

Now that he’s catching boatloads of flak for his smear, he’s claiming to apologize.

When I said this during the interview, I didn’t get it out exactly the way I thought I did. So I apologize to anyone who felt slighted or upset by my response[.]

Now speaking only after widespread opprobrium. How is it possible to take his words of apology as anything other than insincere political CYA?

This is the level of integrity flowing from the Left in these final days of the election, and the level of outright contempt the Left has for us average Americans and in particular for ordinary American women.

There’s Deportation…

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…and there’s deportation. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) has a plan for a serious “deportation.” It’s

an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if [Republicans] win the election. That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America.

Johnson went on in his Just the News interview:

“The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers they will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyist or something to stay in DC.” The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats then leads to a “business reorganization proposition” for federal government, he said.
“You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and…almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” he said. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.

A very profitable twofer: move get Federal bureaucrats into the hinterland/middle America/flyover country among us citizens whose lives bureaucrat shenanigans so severely impact, and shrink the manpower size of the Federal government since those bureaucrats who would refuse to move would be selecting themselves for termination from Federal employ.

Win-win.

News Bias

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The Washington Post has a problem, and it seems to stem from the paper’s (owner Jeff Bezos’) decision to not endorse a Presidential candidate this year or, so far, in any subsequent election cycle..

The wave of customer defections after the controversial decision…has further eroded an already shrunken base of Post subscribers and heightened feelings among some staff that the paper faces an existential crisis.

Amanda Morris, WaPo “disability reporter:”

Please don’t cancel your subscriptions. It won’t impact Bezos—it hurts journalists and makes another round of layoffs more likely[.]

In keeping with guild solidarity, players from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others chimed in, with their precious #WhyISubscribe.

250,000 have become ex-subscribers since The Decision; that’s 10% of the paper’s subscriber base.

Since the editorial room had intended to endorse Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, it seems likely that the vast majority of those cancelations are by the paper’s strong Left readers.

This would seem to show how politically unbalanced the WaPo‘s readership is. That, in turn, seems a strong indication of how biased the paper’s news room has been.

That bias is executed by the news room writers’ and editors’ decisions of which facts to include and which to omit in their news writings, what and how much personal opinion to include or try to sub rosa embed in the pieces, what stories they choose to write and what stories they choose to downplay or outright spike.

Maybe if those writers and editors can learn to be objective and balanced in news pieces and carry out their opining on the opinion pages, or if Bezos can replace his current news room with a crew of writers and editors who will and who will back up their anonymous sources with at least two on-the-record sources (which used to be a journalistic standard of integrity), the paper can begin to start being a credible source of actual news.

Economies, Culture, Regulation

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Greg Ip had a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal touting the strength of our economy, especially in comparison with the European Union’s continental economy. Among other points, he had this regarding the difference between our economy and the EU’s, and this is what I want to focus on in this post.

More important is the role of technology. No EU company worth more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $108 billion, “has been set up from scratch in the last 50 years,” while all six US companies worth more than $1.08 trillion were created in this period, Draghi said. America’s companies are also faster to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence, which explains much higher productivity in professional services, finance, insurance, and information technology services.

Ip missed, though, that that difference is from a combination of things that are not economic, but things that make an economy more or less capable, that make rapid technological advances possible. Those things are culture and the regulatory environment that puts bounds on what economic players are allowed or required to do.

Our economy has, until relatively recently, players much more willing to run risks and accept mistakes and failures on the way to grand success. That risk-taking runs the gamut from guys like Elon Musk (an outlier, to be sure, but he’s not that far extreme, except in the venues in which he’s chosen to operate) to heads of families striking out, many even before they have families to head, to start their own businesses, risking everything they have just to get started.

The EU has no one willing to run the risks an Elon Musk does. Even the Fiat acquisition of Chrysler was achieved less by a risk-taking entrepreneur leading Fiat than it was an acquisition supported, indirectly, by the US government and EU regulations, since the combined company would be governed by EU rules. Neither do EU individual families start new businesses at anything close to the rate American families do: they’re much more used to government presence in their lives and to reliance on government for their business success.

The EU’s regulatory environment is much more restrictive than ours, as well, for all the recent explosion of regulations governing our business behavior.  EU’s more socialist-in-effect governance that tends to cap performance so the laggards—for whatever reason they lag, good or ill—can keep up. EU regulations are especially restrictive regarding areas that our nation would consider competition and the outcomes of competition.

Gains from a willingness, or government limits on willingness, to run risks aren’t as available to EU economic actors the way they are here.

Teachers Union Against Minority Child Education

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That’s the outcome of Nebraska teachers union opposition to Nebraska’s scholarship program to support families with children wanting to attend private schools, a program administered by Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska.

The union, through the Save Our Schools organization that the union backs got onto next week’s general election ballot a referendum aimed at repealing that scholarship program.

Currently, some 1,500 children benefit academically and their parents benefit financially from those scholarships. Of those families,

half…have household income below 213% of the federal poverty level, the measure used to determine eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Some 40% are nonwhite and 11.5% have special needs.

(For 2023, the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four was $30,000. 213% of that works out to a skosh under $64,000.)

But the teachers union says to Hell with those minority children and those special needs children. Their union-controlled public schools are the only schools acceptable. It doesn’t matter that those public schools are broad failures.