Category Archives: morality

An “Apology”

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Teachers Union Against Minority Child Education

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Harris’ Closing Argument

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made her closing argument Tuesday on the Ellipse, hoping the location would emphasize the irony and contrast in comparison with former-President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech there on 6 January 2021. The irony is lost, though, when you recall that Trump, in that speech, called on his supporters to protest peacefully at the Capitol and that the rioters there were a tiny few compared to the thousands on the Ellipse who listened to his speech—and that those rioters had begun gathering at the Capitol before Trump gave his speech.

That’s a minor point regarding Harris’ closing “argument.” The high points of her speech are these:

Trump is a bad man, Evil incarnate. She spent several minutes on this.

Harris has a to-do list. That list was largely devoid of how she would enact any particularly item, it even lacked specificity of what many of those items actually might be. She did promise price controls, though, in the form of punishing businesses for what she calls price gauging, but which have been price increases caused by the several inflation-spiking policies and regulations she and her boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, enacted in the first few months of their administration and expanded on over the last three-and-a-half years. She did, though, make explicit her price control plan to cap drug prices.

Her to-do list also included these inflation-driving items: $25,000 to each first-time home buyer and increasing even further her tax credits for families with children.

She tried to contrast Trump’s security policies with her own, non-specific plans, terming Trump in another of her “bad man” claims a threat to global security. She tried to slide past the security our nation, and our friends and allies, enjoyed during his last term—no wars at all, and the Abraham Peace Accords in the Middle East.

This is in contrast with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration’s panic-ridden abandonment of Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly naked threats to conquer the Republic of China, Iran’s nearby nuclear weapon breakout, and open warfare by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists on Israel, a war aided and abetted, and entered into, by Iran. And there’s the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden situation, a situation in which her administration’s policy has functionally surrendered those waters to Houthi terrorists via this administration’s determinedly ineffective tit-for-tat responses to Houthi missile and drone attacks all along what used to be a busy route for commercial shipping.

Most of her to-do list, most of her policies, were left unspecified, unclarified, vague. This gloss-over was deliberate: her policies are ill-defined in her own mind.

There are a couple of exceptions to that last, though. She fully intends to support eliminating altogether the Senate filibuster so she can convert our nation to one-party rule. She fully intends to support revamping (I can’t call it reforming) our Supreme Court so she can convert it from its Constitutional role of coequal branch and check on the other two branches into a rubber stamp court supporting whatever her one-party government wants to do.

This is not someone whom we can afford running our nation. Nor is the Party she heads.

No Compromise

Posted on by
Reply

Not even a little bit. That would be the outcome of a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the next Senate as that majority eliminates the filibuster. One outcome of that refusal is demonstrated by Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a Tuesday interview with NBC.

Q: What concessions would be on the table? Religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider with a Republican-controlled Congress?
Ms Harris: I don’t think that we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.
Q: To Republicans like, for example, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, who would back something like this on a Democratic agenda, if, in fact, Republicans control Congress, would you offer them an olive branch, or is that off the table? Is that not an option for you?
Ms Harris: I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals, because we can go on with a variety of scenarios. Let’s just start with a fundamental fact: a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and that cannot be negotiable—which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v Wade. And that is it.

Leave aside Harris’ cynical distortion of the legal fact (cynical because as the talented prosecuting lawyer that she is, Harris knows better): there never has been a fundamental freedom for a woman to have an abortion. There has been a Supreme Court opinion that a woman can have an abortion under some conditions. Court opinions have the force of law, but they are not law: only Congress can make laws under our Constitution. In the present case, that Court opinion was rescinded under Roe.

The larger matter here is what it is women should be allowed to do—what their fundamental right is—under a Harris administration. That fundamental right is a woman’s “right” to kill the baby she’s carrying. To deny even a religious exemption to that is to deny a fundamental right that actually exists: the baby’s right to life.

Another Reason for School Choice

Posted on by
Reply

Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pushes its LGBTQ curriculum on its children down through pre-kindergarten—expose[ing] children as young as 3 to “Pride storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions, and elementary-age same-sex romance—the school district refuses to notify those children’s parents when this happens in particular classes, and the district refuses to allow those parents to opt their children out of such “lessons.” The 4th Circuit court upheld that atrocious and abusive behavior, so a coalition of parents across a range of religions is petitioning the Supreme Court to take the case and uphold the parents, reversing the 4th Circuit.

A plethora of friend-of-the-courts briefs are flowing in encouraging the Court to take up the case.

And

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.
…
The poll shows that almost three-quarters, 71%, of likely voters said a teacher should notify parents if their students say they want to go by a different gender.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision and subsequent ruling, if it takes the case, the way forward is clear. The 4th Circuit’s egregious error and MCPS’ enthusiastically aggressive child abuse and disregard of parents’ wishes illustrate the difficulty of getting public K-12 schools to do their job. Those schools no longer are worth the trouble or our tax money. Instead, this is just one more reason for parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of charter or voucher schools and homeschooling. And for pushing for more charter and voucher schools.