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.

Now Republican House management (they’re not leaders) are skittering away from that commitment. Instead, under the artificial deadline of a government shutdown due to lack of funding (itself a coarse distortion, since the government would only partially shut down, and separately, there is plenty of revenue flowing in under current tax law to fund most of the present government), those Republicans look like they’re preparing to cave and give the Progressive-Democrats everything they want. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R, MN)

confirmed to Fox News Digital that passing minibuses is “on the table” and blamed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) for not working with the House on its individual spending bills.
“Due to the Schumer Senate’s inability to pass individual appropriations bills and the tight timeline we’re working with, all options are on the table including minibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Speaker Johnson’s leadership, the days of massive omnibus bills are behind us.”

No. This is excuse-making for the Republicans’ timidity. This is abject surrender to the Progressive-Democrats. There is no tight timeline—the partial shutdown won’t be a disaster, as prior shutdowns—the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that—have amply demonstrated. To the extent there is any sort of deadline, it’s on the Progressive-Democratic Party for refusing to negotiate spending cuts in any serious fashion and on Schumer for forcing through the Senate an irresponsibly spendthrift bill. And on weak Republican Senators for negotiating so poor a foreign aid and border (in)security bill in the first instance.

And this, from a Republican Congressman who was too timid, or too lacking in moral courage, or both, to allow himself to be identified:

These negotiations are less focused on getting 216 Republicans to vote for them and more on getting the majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats to vote for them, and that concern about voting on all 12 is not going to be as prominent.

This is just a sellout of those commitments.

These managers need to find the courage of the convictions their mouths utter and hold 12 individual floor votes, or they need to get out of the way. These managers currently are on track to make Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) Speaker, by a wide margin, and what a disaster that would be for our republic.

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[.]

But apparently not all women; only those who suit the whims of Inspire‘s managers. Or the whims of those who cowed Inspire‘s managers into this erasure.

It could be, after all, that those managers aren’t really antisemitic bigots. They could be nothing but abject cowards.

I describe, you decide.

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[.]”

No, that’s not the problem. Unless “Sam” is just looking for a hookup with a flesh and blood f*k doll (in which case, ghosting is a non sequitur), his problem is that he is, to use the clinical term, a chickenshit. If those women are going to ghost him (the horror) over his right-leaning beliefs or over the differences between his and those women’s beliefs, they’re too shallow or too intolerant, or both, and in any event they’re not good enough for him. He should welcome their departure from his present and future company.

To the extent the news writer’s feverish characterization is accurate, it’s because these Gen-Z males are such beta and gamma males.

They’re also an insult to pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republicans, being as they are too weak to stand by their leanings.

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.

It’s entirely appropriate, though, that folks stand only for our national anthem (one exception: it’s traditional for folks to stand for the Hallelujah Chorus from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah). Our anthem, after all, stands for our nation as a whole and symbolizes our national aspirations for unity, our liberty, and our equality of opportunity.

Lift Every Voice and Sing is a very fine song and appropriate in a wide variety of milieus, but its use in this context can only be divisive, singling out one group of Americans as deserving national respect, rather than all of us.

Oh, and no one stood for Malone’s performance, either.

Progressive-Democrats’ faux outrage over every thing that doesn’t suit their veriest whim is getting elderly and tired.

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.

Two lies—and I use that term advisedly, given that Caldwell and Hackman are highly talented news writers for whom words are their stock in trade, and so they plainly know better—in that sentence. Denver has had an influx of not a single migrant. It has had an influx of 40,000 illegal aliens in that little over a year. Their second lie is their claim that those 40,000 illegals going into Denver are more than any other city, per capita. That number is what Eagle Pass, El Paso, McAllen, Laredo each get in a month’s or two months’ time.

Back to Johnson’s faux angst. [C]risis in this city.

  • Denver has spent more than $42 million in the past year to house and feed the new arrivals
  • Public schools have ballooned by more than 3,000 students, creating a budget shortfall of roughly $17.5 million
  • The city’s safety-net hospital has seen at least 9,000 migrant patients in the past year, costing at least $10 million in unreimbursed care

Ya ta-ta, ya ta-ta. These problems are of Johnson’s and his city government’s deliberate making. His city is a sanctuary city that happily invites illegal aliens in and thereby at least tacitly supports the Biden administration’s decision to not enforce our border. Johnson would have a beef, maybe, if he’d rescind Denver’s sanctuary city status and stop encouraging folks whose first move in coming into our country is to deliberately break our laws.

But he won’t do that. He’s happy, like the Left generally, to blame others for the problems he’s causing for his city.

On top of that, by maintaining his city as a sanctuary for illegal aliens, he is, along with all the other sanctuary jurisdictions, creating problems for the rest of us. And we’re supposed to sympathize with him.