Misplaced Push

Too many Republican Senators are joining their Senate Progressive-Democrat colleagues in pushing Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) to drop his blocking of President Joe Biden’s (D) military appointments and flag officer promotions.

Tuberville is holding up—not blocking—final confirmation votes on those appointments and promotion lists over SecDef’s insistence on using taxpayer funds to pay for abortion and abortion-related services used by military members and/or families.

Tuberville isn’t holding up anything; he’s merely blocking blanket moves to use unanimous consent for approval. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) readily enough could bring each of those appointments and promotion lists to the Senate floor for votes, but they refuse. Apparently, they want, instead, the spectacle of the holdup.

That’s a minor point, though. The larger point is SecDef Lloyd Austin’s stubbornness in demanding that those tax dollars be used for abortion services, Hyde Amendment be damned, on the legal front, and he just doesn’t care about those babies’ lives on the moral front.

If Austin wants his promotion lists, and if Biden wants his appointments, all they need do is remove their demand to spend our money on abortion services and on abortion.

It’s that straightforward.

Biden’s Ongoing Betrayal of Ukraine

The lede in the Wall Street Journal article says it all.

The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian invaders is dimming hopes that negotiations for an end to the fighting could come this year and raising the specter of an open-ended conflict, according to Western officials.

The terms of negotiation have been clearly, and repeatedly, stated by Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy. President Joe Biden (D) has steadfastly ignored them, as he’s more terrified of Russian President Vladimir Putin than he is supportive of actual Ukrainian victory, territorial integrity, and national sovereignty.

And this, in the immediately following paragraph:

A potential stalemate would test President Biden’s stated strategy of pouring billions of dollars in military aid into Ukraine, to enable Kyiv to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength.

It’s a stalemate created entirely by slow-walking—and outright blocking—delivery of the weapons, ammunition, training, and logistic support the Ukrainian defense establishment needs to win quickly and decisively. It’s a stalemate proximately created by Biden with his refusal to deliver the weapons and ammunition the Ukrainians needed to begin their offensive last winter. Instead, Biden’s timidity in front of Putin delayed the Ukrainians’ start for months, transferring to the barbarian, instead, those months for him to prepare his present defenses.

Then there’s this bit of despicable-ness in the article:

The US stay-the-course strategy holds some risks, however.

There should be no such strategy, and there never should have been. There should have been—and there still should be, with very good effect—a constant acceleration of delivery to Ukraine so that it could have, and still could, win decisively and quickly. Instead, Biden is perfectly happy to have Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including women and children, bleed and die for Biden’s battle between democracy and authoritarianism.

It’s also an immediate Ukrainian battle for national survival, for Ukraine’s very existence. But Biden doesn’t care about that.

Maybe, Instead…

Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, has decided it’s had enough of parent input regarding its program of “storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and same-sex romance for elementary-age children. The MCPS, in its magnanimity, had allowed parents to opt their children out of such things, but the parents, en masse, opted their children out.

MCPS responded by issuing a blanket policy of no exceptions and no notifications—no more opt out for all those uppity recalcitrant parents.

Never mind that

the storybooks…explicitly encourage[e] children to “question sexuality and gender identity, focus on romantic feelings, and embrace gender transitioning[.]
Pre-kindergarten students, for example, are required to read Pride Puppy, which “promotes pride parades as family-friendly events without cautioning about the frequent nudity and sexually explicit conduct….”

Maybe, instead, there should be a blanket removal of the program altogether. It’s time, also, for a blanket removal of the MCPS school board and its Superintendent and staff.

CIOs, Affirmative Action, and Diversity

Company CIOs, Chief Information Officer inhabitants of the C-Suites, claim to be worried about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning colleges’ and universities’ use of race as an admission criterion on their own access to a suitably “diversity”-laden work force.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executives say.

No, rather than looking to plus up their virtue credentials, these executives should be more worried about (prospective) employees’ ability to do the job than about whether their departments have the “correct” balance of skin colors and sexes.

There is this from Juniper Networks‘ CIO:

“I worry about, in universities, if we’re not making it a more hospitable environment, that we make it harder than it is,” said Sharon Mandell…. That means companies and IT leaders need to work to convince diverse workers that technology is “a compelling place, and a welcome place for them.”

That hints at a good start (but only hints); however, by beginning at the college/university level, it renders itself too late to be an effective start. Of course, I’m also, probably naively, assuming a benign definition of “hospitable.”

Hence my question: if these CIOs and their companies are serious, and not just virtue-signaling, what are they doing to improve K-12 education and the resulting better preparation for all students? If all students get an equal opportunity at a quality education, the resulting population of job applicants—whatever the job—will pretty much automatically have a requisite diversity, artificial as that criterion is.

Unless, of course, these CIOs (they wouldn’t be alone in this regard) actually think some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior in ability to other groups of humans and so those lesser groups need special handling and protection.

Do What I Tell You

Nice little school you got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

In response to the Temecula Unified School Board’s decision not to adopt a controversial social studies textbook in May, California [Progressive-Democrat] Governor Gavin Newsom challenged the board’s decision and threatened it with legislative consequences if it does not reverse course.

Here’s Newsom putting it plainly:

If the school board won’t do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children and their parents—and we’ll send the district the bill and fine them for violating state law.

Nor is it Newsom alone. It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party at large, as illustrated by State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D, 29th District):

The antics of the Temecula Valley Unified School District are intolerable and damaging to its students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed. Book bans betray the most basic of California’s core values. I hope the members of the school board are able to reflect on their decisions and come to make better decisions for our children’s futures.

Aside from the all-too-typical Progressive-Democrat lie—no books are being banned by Temecula—students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed depend on their being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic instead of being indoctrinated with the racism and the professional victimhood and oppressor class sewage of CRT.

The antics, to use Rivas’ distortionate term, center on protecting our children, and that’s something the Progressive-Democrat Governor and his cronies object to.