Another Misleading Claim

This one by a Progressive-Democrat: California’s Alex Padilla. In his Tuesday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, he wrote regarding Republicans’ musings about overruling the Senate’s Parliamentarian on the matter of California’s legal right to set its own emissions standards (itself a misleading claim, since what’s in question is whether California, or any State, can set emissions standards more stringent than the Federal government’s),

Republicans are now considering overruling Ms MacDonough, essentially going nuclear and throwing out the rule book in order to get their way.

If they can ignore the parliamentarian on this….

This is so broadly misleading as to approach being deliberately false. Far from ignoring the Parliamentarian, Republicans would be taking her eminently seriously and following Senate rules regarding her ruling, whether voting to overturn it or the Senate’s presiding officer overruling it.

Of course, Padilla knows this; he’s merely demonstrating, with his distortion, why it’s next to impossible to deal with members of his party.

An Example of Global Warming

This one comes from a remark in an article centered on a partially built and then abandoned US military base in the frozen north of Greenland.

The base was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan, known as Project Iceworm, to build a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. The underground site, which was designed to store 600 medium-range ballistic missiles, reveals the extent of US involvement in Greenland going back over half a century.

What happened to it, then?

Camp Century, as the outpost was called, was partially constructed in 1959, and abandoned in 1967 after the ice sheet was deemed too unstable to support the proposed missile-launch network.

Then this happened:

Over the years, ice accumulated and the facility is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.

“Over the years” is 58 years (57 at the time it was rediscovered), and in that short time all that ice—not snow—built up over the site.

Oh, wait—that’s not an example of global warming, it’s an example of the foolishness of the “global warming” mantra of the mainstream Left.

I Want My…Maypo

Late in the Biden administration, as the lede notes,

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

After he was confirmed to the office, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin

called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

Naturally, the NGOs are suing, because they want their filch fruits restored. Just to be sure, they’re also suing Citibank, whose since the freezing has been nothing but obeying a government directive, which they have to do unless and until a court overturns the directive.

Never mind that the staffers expressed, in writing as part of their reviews of the grants during the application process, concerns about excessive-seeming pay for NGO executives; NGOs’ cost claims that had no explanation, much less rationale, for them; or apparent lack of oversight planning.

It’s illustrative of these NGOs’ entitlement mentality that they think they should have the money just because they want it. It’s also one more reason for the necessity of taking several machetes to the jungle undergrowth of Federal government spending.

Five Thoughts on Five Takeaways

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Harvard University President Alan Garber and published “Five Takeaways.” I have five thoughts….

Students at Harvard no longer feel comfortable disagreeing
Upon returning to Harvard as provost in 2011, Garber noticed the spirit of healthy disagreement from his undergraduate days had disappeared. It is something he said concerns him and his colleagues. “Students today find it much harder to have conversations with one another about difficult subjects, particularly with someone they don’t know well with whom they might disagree,” Garber said. “And to me that is a big loss.”

And yet, in all those years he’s chosen to do nothing substantive about any of that. It’s only necessary to see the anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas terrorist physical attacks on Jewish students, protest “encampments” on University quadrangles with associated interference with Jewish students trying to get to class, and above all, his failure to address in any meaningful way those perpetrators and their faculty enablers and encouragers—expulsion of all of the student misbehavers and firing of those misbehaving faculty. He’s done a very few token expulsions while explicitly excusing the vast majority of campers from consequence, and he’s spoken stern words to some of his faculty and masqueraded those as serious moves.

The university wants more diverse viewpoints on its faculty
Garber knows the university has a perception problem with the general public…. …Garber said, “I really understand the resentment that people can feel when they think their problems are not taken seriously enough. That’s something we absolutely must address.”
… “Part of what we need to do is make sure that in the classroom and in other settings, we promote the idea that it doesn’t matter what your personal views are, you need to teach in a way that is fair to multiple points of view,” he said. “And furthermore, you need to enable students to speak up when they have a perspective that is different from the mainstream.”

It’s not perception, it’s fact; this is more Garber downplaying. The rest is empty words. He’s done no substantive hiring, and the nakedly biased teaching and limits on students’ ability to speak differing viewpoints and opinions remain—as he confessed just above.

Antisemitism at Harvard predates Oct. 7, 2023
Garber said he had hints that Harvard had an antisemitism problem but that it hit home for him when he met with Jewish students just after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Two lengthy reports Harvard put out last month detailed the history of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, acknowledging longstanding problems.

Here, too, despite knowing of the antisemitic bigots present at Harvard, he’s chosen to do nothing about them. The two “reports” are nothing more than his administration’s moral equivalence sewage, downplaying the real violence perpetrated on Jewish students while exaggerating anti-Muslim bigotry, which is both rare and nonviolent.

Columbia’s actions didn’t influence Harvard’s
Saying that he doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of Columbia’s negotiations, he said: “What I have heard from other people in colleges and universities is that Columbia had still not resolved their issues with the federal government after many weeks of negotiations.[“]

Here he is, relying on hearsay rather than direct knowledge that would come from directly asking the Columbia President. On the other hand, neither has Harvard resolved its issues. His suit is illustrative of his refusal to try.

More is at stake than winning a lawsuit
Federal funding “is not a gift,” [Garber] said, but money that Harvard uses to fulfill national scientific and other priorities.

It is, absolutely, a gift. The government has no obligation to send our taxpayer dollars to the school, and the school has no intrinsic right to it. Our taxpayer dollars are a government donation, nothing more and nothing less. Garber’s claim that Harvard uses the money for national purposes is wholly irrelevant to that fundamental fact; his claim is just more cynical obfuscation.

Another Privileged University Entity?

The subheadline says it all.

Members of Kappa Alpha Theta, one of the country’s oldest sororities, are fighting for their chosen philanthropy to get its federal funding back

“Their” Federal funding isn’t theirs, or their charity’s, at all. It’s our money, which our elected representatives are pleased to send to them. This is the entitlement attitude of far too many entities associated with our higher education institutions.

According to an April 23 statement by CASA/GAL [KAT’s charity partner], the organization lost its funding because its work did not uphold the department’s new priorities.

That’s reason enough to stop the taxpayer dollar transfers. Donors get to call the shots on how their donations get used, and if the recipient doesn’t want to align, the donations should stop. That includes the Federal government with our money.

Privileged or entitled—or both. It needs to stop, and one way to do that is to withdraw our tax dollars from these spoiled Precious Ones.