Tag Archives: culture

Toddler Temper Tantrums and the Fears of the Timid

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Karl Rove may be whistling past the graveyard in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed. He opened his piece with this lede:

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will lose the US House this fall. That may be right.

Then he ran a counterargument.

Yet the conventional wisdom that Republicans will lose the House may be wrong.
One reason is retirements. Much has been made of how many Republicans are leaving, including talented members such as Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers. But more Democrats (24) than Republicans (19) have announced their retirements. Moreover, all the Republican retirements are in overwhelmingly red districts. The only open GOP seat considered competitive—the Cook Political Report calls it “lean Republican”—is Colorado’s Third District. Cook’s partisan vote index—which estimates a district’s leaning relative to the country based on the two most recent presidential elections—labels it an R+7 seat.
Retiring Democrats represent more-competitive seats. Cook rates the open Michigan Seventh and Eighth districts as “toss-ups.” They are R+2 and R+1 respectively. Cook classifies the California 47th (D+3) and Virginia Seventh (D+1) as “lean Democrat.” The Maryland Sixth and New Hampshire Second (both D+2) are “likely Democrat.”

Rove gave too little credence to the damage the toddler temper tantrum, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) and her Chaos Caucus supporters, does. These toddlers may well hand the House Speakership, and control of the House agenda, to the Progressive-Democrat Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) before the current session ends, especially given the number of nominally Conservative Republicans who are abjectly cutting and running from their House seats, whether at the end of the current session or quitting just as soon as they can get their desks cleared.

The inability of Republicans to agree among themselves on what to put forward—the Chaos Caucus blows up anything that doesn’t suit their veriest whims to t—and the party’s timidity in putting any Conservative policies forward and putting the onus on the Progressive-Democrat-ruled Senate and the White House to work with them—tells the voting public that this is a ragtag collection of junior high politicians not ready for the national obligations they have.

Rove also gave too little effect to the timidity of the remaining “mainstream” Republican Congressmen. There are number of legitimate conservative policies that are proposed by the Freedom Caucus (when they aren’t acting in their Chaos Caucus guise). These, though, are routinely rejected by too many of the other Republicans in the House Republican caucus under the excuse that the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators would never agree to them, and that the Progressive-Democrat President would never sign, even were something to get to his desk. So, these Republicans won’t even try. They’re too timid to do something that might force the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians to take a stand, much less to force them to work with Republicans. Instead, these Timid Republicans would rather try, meekly, to work with the Progressive-Democrats, ceding functional House control to the minority party.

That timidity isn’t encouraging for voters.

Rove also underestimated the effect on voters by those who are heading out the door just as the battle is heating up. That timidity may well turn off voters, voters who won’t vote for the overtly destructive Progressive-Democratic Party, but who find they can’t trust Republican candidates who might well run away themselves. These voters are likely to stay home, which with today’s divisions is the same as voting Progressive-Democrat.

More Progressive-Democrats (my term, not Rove’s) than Republicans are leaving the fight? Only by five, and that, out of 43 departures, is as thin as the current Republican nominal majority. The Republican Party, too, has demonstrated in elections from 2018 forward that it’s fully capable of throwing away eminently winnable seats and donating them to the Progressive-Democrats. It would take only a net gain of five seats to get Jeffries as Speaker.

Public disgust with a Republican Party populated, at least at the national level, with toddlers and timids may well cost us a government interested in our borders, our economic strength—our national security.

Whistling past the graveyard, indeed.

Election Interference

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The No Labels group has folded its tents and quit the political race for this year, for a few reasons I’ve written about before. It appears, though, that there’s more to this fiasco than understood heretofore [ellipses in the original, emphasis added].

Democratic strategist Karen Finney argued No Labels had presented a “dangerous” threat to Biden’s re-election chances that Democrats, including her, actively worked to undermine.
They were very dangerous because they had over $70 million to get on the ballot,” Finney recalled.
“And what they were promising…They were promising that they could win states like Texas. And again, it was totally illogical, but it was a very real threat that myself and others worked very hard to not just undermine, but to make sure that the people they were talking to understood, that their rhetoric just did not work, and their math did not work[.”]

This is a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party openly bragging about having successively interfered with our upcoming election through sabotage of a third party’s effort to field a competing slate of candidates.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s on the ballot in this fall’s national, State, and local elections.

Coerced Abortion

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Kansas’ House Bill 2436, as amended by the Senate (the Supplemental Note was incorporated), was then passed by the House 82-37 and by the Senate 27-11. With unusual clarity for politicians, the definitions of Coercion and of Financial harm are defined in the bill with crystalline clarity.

The bill would make it a felony to coerce a pregnant woman into having an abortion through physical or financial threats….

Now it’s before Kansas’ Progressive-Democrat Governor Laura Kelly, who is dithering over whether to sign it.

How is there even a question about this? Leave aside the baby’s right to its life, whatever happened—in Kelly’s mind—to a woman’s control over her own body?

How is this Possible?

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Personal information of 7.6 million AT&T customers and of 65 million former AT&T customers have appeared on the dark web in the last two weeks. Stuff happens, even egregiously bad stuff. What makes this stuff especially egregiously bad, though, is AT&T‘s claim that the data appear[] to have come from 2019 or earlier.

That especially bad status flows from some questions:

Why wasn’t the data breach discovered those 5 or more years earlier; why did AT&T not know of the breach of its own systems until they saw the results of the breach just recently?

If AT&T did know of the breach those years ago, why did they sit on the information all this time?

If AT&T did discover the data breach promptly, and the data that appeared on the dark web only happened to be from 2019 and prior, what were the safe guards in place—or not—for what would have been archived data? What are the safeguards for data from 5 years ago through to the present? How does AT&T know those data haven’t been penetrated and stolen, also?

Progressive-Democratic Party’s War on Christianity

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As part of the White House’s Easter celebration and Easter Egg Hunt, the White House held an Easter Art Event. This year, thought, that art contest was censored.

Children of National Guard members are not allowed to submit artwork with religious symbolism for the White House’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event [apparently separate from Jill Biden’s EGGucation theme].
This year, the Adjutants General of the National Guard requested on behalf of First Lady Jill Biden for the children of parents in the National Guard to submit artwork with the theme, “Celebrating our Military Families.”
According to the rules, the Easter egg design “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

Apparently, Guardsmen or their children aren’t capable of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus as part of celebrating military families. Or such a celebration is questionable.

Perhaps instead, art centered on breakfast tacos would have been acceptable to Jill Biden, in lieu of overtly Christian art on one of the most important and overtly Christian holidays during this White House event that used to be an Easter-centered event. Cynically,

Other material that is prohibited from the designs include “material that promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any group or individual or promotes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.”

Except for us Christians. Bigotry, hatred, or harm against us Christians by our children’s exclusion from the children’s art contest based on our religion, was perfectly fine.

It is, though, entirely consistent with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cynical deprecation of Easter by declaring the day a Transgender Day of Visibility.