Tag Archives: responsibilities

Sulk on the Sidelines

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Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (R, IN) has decided to take her marbles and go home in a snit. Not literally, she’ll remain, formally, a Republican, but

she won’t sit on committees or caucus with the House Republican Conference for the time being and will instead focus on working with the new “Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency” caucus on cutting spending.

She says, in so many words,

I will stay as a registered Republican but will not sit on committees or participate in the caucus until I see that Republican leadership in Congress is governing[.]
I do not need to be involved in circuses.

She’s not far wrong about the circus aspect, especially with the ego-driven Chaos Caucus continuing its knee-jerk obstructionism. Quitting the game, though, instead of staying in it, doing her best to reduce, if not eliminate, the circus aspect, is the move of a coward.

Pushing the DOGE spending cuts—whatever they are; so far, all we have is news outlet claims—all by her august self is a move borne of self-important arrogance. Demanding things be done her way or she’ll go sulk in her room is not the definition of leadership governing; it’s just more personal aggrandizement.

She doesn’t want to be just one voice in the cacophony. However, with her ducking out, she’s left the serious caucus with one less voice for functional governance.

Spartz is betraying her constituents.

She’s also contributing to Progressive-Democratic Party continued control of the House, given the Republican Party’s miniscule majority, and the Chaos Caucus’ preference for that over compromise with their fellow Republicans. That’s another betrayals of her constituents.

Blame Someone Else

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Safeway is closing one of its San Francisco stores due to concerns about high crime rates and employee and customer safety in that store’s neighborhood. Oh, the hue and cry.

The Reverand Erris Edgerly, for instance, is crying foul.

It’s obvious the community has been struggling, but to just up and leave without calling a meeting, with no alternative for groceries, is upsetting. There was no community outreach at all.

It’s obvious that the crime rate in Edgerly’s community has been out of control for quite some time and the safety of his community members has been in the wind for all that time. From that, it’s just as obvious that community “leaders,” like the good Reverand, have contributed nothing useful to mitigating the situation (in truth, the city has done nothing, also, but that doesn’t excuse the community’s “leaders”).

Outreach would have been just more chit-chat and worse than pointless: advance notice of the store’s closing would have been too likely to trigger an accelerated spate of break-ins and lootings, exposing the store’s employees and customers to even more danger in that end game.

Maybe the Edgerlys of the neighborhood should look in a mirror to find some of the folks with whom to…outreach.

Not Entirely Alone

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Recall the Macy’s case where an employee succeeded in covering up, for a long time, more than $150 million in bookkeeping mistakes. Now Macy’s has finished its internal investigation and decided that the employee had been acting alone, making all those mistakes all by himself.

The employee told investigators about having mistakenly understated the amount of small parcel delivery expenses in late 2021, the person briefed on the probe said. Macy’s has said that the employee had responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting….
To hide the error, the employee continued to intentionally make erroneous accounting entries and falsify underlying documentation until the misstatement was discovered this fall….

Furthermore [emphasis added],

Macy’s didn’t say how it uncovered the erroneous entries or how they went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Maybe the employee wasn’t acting entirely alone. He had the functionally ineffective assistance of too-inattentive supervisors, too-inattentive checkers of his work, and that auditor which maybe was just rubberstamping company books and collecting fees.

Macy’s management might want to expand its investigation and address those inadequacies.

Biden Administration Newspeak Dictionary in Action

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The Supreme Court is hearing, this week, the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration’s argument that the Tennessee law (and by extension the similar laws of nearly half the States of our Union) that prohibits the administration of

medical treatments to minors if the purpose is to enable a gender transition or to address “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity[]”

is somehow unconstitutional. The case to watch is US v Skrmetti.

The administration’s case is centered on this:

A teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot.

The lawyers arguing for this go on to insist that this represents a violation of our Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

No.

Babies aren’t assigned anything at birth. They are born with the characteristics they gained at egg fertilization; in the present case their male or female sex characteristic is demonstrated by their possessing XY chromosomes or XX chromosomes from that moment.

It’s illustrative of the hypocrisy of this administration that so many members chant “follow the science” and then proceed to ignore it. “Follow the science” to these worthies plainly is just a voodooist’s incantation cynically applied for street cred with the far left of our society.

Far more importantly, though, this use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of a dictionary of American English is nakedly dishonest. This use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of the Supreme Court’s long-standing (since Lynch v Alworth-Stephens Co) injunction to use the plain, obvious, and rational meaning is naked contempt for our court system.

The Tennessee law needs to be upheld in no uncertain terms, and these administration lawyers need to be severely sanctioned for their insistence on bringing this frivolous case and for their contempt of court premise.

“Intractable Problem”

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That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.

Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.

The news writers added this:

Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.

This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.

Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.

That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.

The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.

Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.