When is Reducing Employee Hours not a Layoff?

When it’s being done to reallocate city funds to support illegal aliens. That’s Denver’s Newspeak Dictionary version of what the city managers are choosing to do to the city’s Parks and Recreations system “on call” employees, folks like lifeguards, front desk workers, and coaches. The parks and recs’ $4.3 million budget is better used taking care of those illegal aliens.

Oh, and never mind what those layoffs, to use an American English dictionary definition of Denver’s action, will do to the city’s residents, especially the children, who will no longer have any place to swim or to play the sports that used to be coached.

A Necessary Cancelation

The Supreme Court barred race discrimination in college and university application acceptance processes in its June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v President and Fellows of Harvard College. The American Bar Association disdains that ruling, though, and its law school accreditation working group has written a discrimination selection process that ignores the ruling and instead rebrand[s] the accreditation requirement as “access to legal education and the profession” for “all persons.”

“Structural Changes”

Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Republican Timidity

Recall that ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed to individual floor votes on each of the dozen separate appropriations bills. His position, and he was right IMNSHO, was that lumping them all together into a single omnibus spending bill only led to increased Federal government spending by preventing Congressmen from debating and voting on those bills individually—omnibus made the lot of them an all or nothing proposition.

Cowardice or Bigotry?

Leah Goldstein is a champion road racing cyclist who was invited to be a keynote speaker at Inspire‘s 8 March International Women’s Day confab in Canada.

Goldstein also is an Israeli Defense Force veteran, having served some 30 years ago. For that heinous crime, she was disinvited from the organization’s confab. Apparently, an “extremely vocal group” took issue with her appearing, much less speaking. Inspire justified its…behavior…with this:

Our focus at INSPIRE has been and will always be to create safe spaces to honor, share, and celebrate the remarkable stories of women and nonbinary individuals[.]

That Isn’t the Problem

Gen-Z males (on the admittedly limited basis of this article, I can’t call them men) think they have a dating problem, and The Free Pressnews writer thinks it’s a demographic problem. “Sam,” an otherwise unidentified DC graduate student (unidentified because he’s that timid, see the following), had this:

“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” Sam, a 25-year-old graduate student in DC, tells me.
He said he hides his pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republican leanings by default—out of fear his dates, who are almost always on the left, might ghost him.
“You just have to assume that most girls are progressive and constantly try to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing[.]”

A Progressive-Democrat is Offended

Just before Sunday’s Super Bowl kickoff, Andra Day sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, then Post Malone sang America the Beautiful, and then Reba McEntire sang our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.

A Progressive-Democrat Congressman from Tennessee, Steve Cohen, took umbrage that fans stood only for our national anthem and not for Day’s performance.

Very very few stood for “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The Negro National Anthem. Not a pretty picture of Super Bowl crowd.

Denver Isn’t That Furious

Denver’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Mike Johnson is upset that the Federal government didn’t solve his biggest civic problem. When the Senate voted down the Federal bill in question, he posted on Instagram,

Today is a day the residents of Denver should be heartbroken. And they should be furious because we know we have a humanitarian crisis in this city[.]

Aside: Caldwell and Hackman had this in their piece at the link:

This city of 713,000 people has absorbed nearly 40,000 migrants in a little over a year, more per capita than any other US city.

Long Past its Use-By Date

The Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General Office has found problems in the VA’s process for vetting the contractors it hires. The IG’s audit findings include these (not an exhaustive list by me):

  • 47 of 50 contract files (94 percent) did not include position designation records that established the position investigative requirements for the contract
  • 34 of 50 contracts (68 percent) did not include contract language to communicate contractor vetting requirements to the contractor
  • 215 of the 286 contractor employees reviewed (about 75 percent) did not have evidence of completed fingerprint checks

Biden Administration’s Monthly Job Numbers

Peter Earle, American Institute for Economic Research Senior Research Fellow, has the tale.

In 28 years, I’ve never seen 11 of 12 months where job numbers came out looking very strong, and then they were revised downwards.

Which raises the question in my pea brain: are Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his economic staff and his bureaucrats at the Labor Department really that incompetent, or are they manipulating the initial numbers for their political benefit?

These aren’t rounding errors that happen to be overstatements rather than understatements or balancing out over the months, either. According to the Daily Caller: