Category Archives: culture

Blame Ducking

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It’s not blame shifting or blame casting, even though it might seem so. Those are just tools, though, employed in the cause of ducking blame. Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, has provided the latest version.

Electricity rates are spiking in the State over which he rules. PJM Interconnection, the State’s largest power provider, has approved 38 GW of new generation, but the generators are not being built: high interest rates and inflation, not Shapiro’s fault but demonstratively that of his party’s actions at the Federal level, have made the building too costly, even with the plethora of green subsidies.

Shapiro has, though,

pitched an energy plan to fast-track the construction of renewables and a cap-and-trade program that would effectively subsidize them by punishing fossil fuels. Such policies would likely lead to the retirement of more base-load fossil fuel generators….

And that restriction on energy supply can only further drive up energy prices for Pennsylvanians. This sort of thing already has done so, in fact, hence the present spike for the State’s citizens.

Now Shapiro is blaming PJM for those rising prices while ducking away from his own green policies, and his party’s national-level policies, that are the actual cause of the straits in which Pennsylvania’s citizens find themselves.

This is the Progressive-Democrat mantra: it’s not their fault; it’s never their policies. It’s always and everywhere someone else’s fault.

Progressive-Democrat Obstructionism

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The Trump administration, this time in the form of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has extended an 8-month buyout offer to the CIA. Typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s insistence on Federal government power, Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) had this objection:

There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer[.]

That’s the Party position on government: nothing is permitted unless Government explicitly permits it. Of course, that’s not how our government works in the structure laid out by our Constitution. Quite the opposite, in fact: the lack of explicit statutory authority is no bar at all against the President—or the CIA Director in the present case—making such an offer.

For Kaine’s benefit, though like his Party cronies, it’s doubtful he’ll read it, here are the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Of course, Trump, and Ratcliffe, would need statutory authority to require those folks to take the buyout offers, but no such requirement exists—only the offer. Which is a better severance package than most any private sector organization has ever offered. The CIA personnel, and those other Federal civilian personnel, under the offer even get to keep their current insurance benefits; they won’t even be forced onto the horribly expensive COBRA plans for the eight months.

Government Moving at the Speed of Business

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This is what the Trump administration has done in the first couple of weeks, much less its first 100 days.

  • offered buyouts to 2 million civilian full-time federal workers. Remains to be seen how many will take the offer, but the offer was paired with warnings of being fired if the offer isn’t taken
  • more on Federal employment:
    • ordered federal workers back to the office full-time and agencies to take steps to halt remote work arrangements
    • freeze on federal hiring, except for military, immigration enforcement, national security, and public safety jobs
    • reinstated first-term Schedule F Executive Order, stripping potentially hundreds of thousands of government workers of government employment protections, making them easier to fire
    • acting director OMB memo: agency heads told to identify employees on probationary periods, or who have served less than two years
    • 160 NSC staff members “sent home”
  • outright fired some folks
    • 1,000 officials appointed by Joe Biden
    • heads of Coast Guard and TSA, and “other officials” fired
  • 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department, including environmental, criminal, national security, civil rights lawyers, and some immigration court staff, have been reassigned, some to newly formed Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group
  • issued memo pausing potentially trillions of dollars in federal aid…. The freeze was blocked by a Federal district judge, but the review/audit and requirements for substantive recommendations for cutting remains in place
  • freeze on new civil rights litigation, halted all pending environmental litigation
  • ordered a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending assessments of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy
  • review of FEMA with a view to reform or close down
  • eliminated government diversity programs, including closing all federal offices, eliminating DEI-related jobs. Workers in those positions put on paid leave. Ordered hiring to be based on merit, with no racial, sex, religious discrimination allowed
  • reinstatement of thousands of troops involuntarily discharged for refusing Wuhan Virus vaccines during the Situation

Whodathunk a government could move that fast?

So Much for Bipartisanship

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, after spending the Biden years ignoring Republican input, have pushed for bipartisanship since President Donald Trump (R) resumed his position in the White House. Other Progressive-Democrat politicians have said maybe not.

Now, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), has made it official. Regarding what he views as “extreme MAGA Republican agenda,”

We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.

This is why nothing a Party Congressman—in either house—can be believed when he claims to want bipartisanship. This Party practice of deliberate obstruction for obstruction’s sake and divisiveness solely in the name of Party, is why it’s so hard for us as Americans or as a nation to have nice things.

Testing?

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Some folks think that Baby Kim, the gang leader of northern Korea, is beginning to question the loyalty of the youngest adult and near-adult cohorts in that area.

He is particularly worried about the foreign media trickling into his information-repressed country….
At risk is Kim’s ability to maintain the illusion of North Korea as a socialist paradise, which is key to his ability to maintain power. And no group is more vulnerable to ideological slippage than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Thus,

That is why Kim has handed a central propaganda role of late to the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade. …hailed as national heroes for helping to rebuild a western border region leveled by summer floods. Over four months, they erected 15,000 houses, schools and hospitals, the country’s state media claimed.
…
The construction work, Kim was quoted as saying in state media, had represented a “good opportunity for training our young people to be staunch defenders and reliable builders of socialism.”

That’s one test. Baby Kim also has sent 12,000 soldiers to fight on the side of the Russians against Ukraine. Those soldiers, despite their claimed reputation for prowess, are performing extremely poorly, even after accounting for the Russian tactics they’re expected to operate within.

Could Baby Kim be testing Ukraine as his version of being sent to the Eastern Front? It’s true enough that a severely wounded northern Korean soldier kills himself rather than risk capture, or his comrades murder him to prevent that capture, even as they run away from the battlefield. Those incidents, possibly representing a newly claimed loyalty in an attempt to protect the family left behind, are quite rare, though, compared to the casualty rate they’re experiencing.