Author Archives: eehines

Speaker Johnson’s Job

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) has a job to do, and The Wall Street Journal tried to characterize it this way:

…Johnson has to decide whether to cut a government funding deal with Democrats that risks costing him his job.

No. The House’s job, and so Speaker Johnson’s job, is to control the Federal government’s spending. That job, that spending control, most assuredly does not include cutting deals with a Progressive-Democratic Party that is bent on profligate spending. That he’s confronted with so many timid Republicans desperate for the comfort of loyal opposition rather than the hard reality of governing only makes his own job harder. That timidity, no more than spendthriftiness, alters his job not a whit.

If the government partially shuts down, that’s on those obstructionist Progressive-Democrats, even as they’re aided and abetted by timid Republicans.

Progressive-Democrats Protecting Their Own

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There’s a move afoot that might result in the Progressive-Democrats ruling the Senate won’t deign hold a trial for the just-impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They’ll just table the matter and walk away.

…rumblings that US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) plans to table and not even hold an impeachment hearing to try Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas….

Senator Eric Schmitt (R, MO) emphasized the need for the trial in his letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY):

He called on McConnell to oppose any efforts by [Progressive-]Democrats “to shirk their constitutional duty, ensure that the Senate conducts a proper trial, and that every senator, Republican and Democrat, adjudicates this matter when the Senate returns.”

If Party really believes the charges over which Mayorkas was impeached are baseless, they’d be better to hold the trial and quickly acquit. What is it they’re covering up?

In the event, a properly unified Republican Senate minority could easily force the trial by simply blocking all Senate legislation until the trial is held and completed. All they need do is block cloture votes. If they can find the courage to do so, a commodity in reduced supply in today’s Republican Party.

How Good is Good Enough?

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The EPA has finalized, despite a plethora of public comment decrying the move, a pollution regulation that, among other things, tries to vastly reduce the amount of soot particles in the air we breathe. Vastly reduce: from the current standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 9 micrograms per cubic meter—from almost nothing to even more almost nothing.

Never mind that the ordinary march of technology and ordinary free market forces have already reduced the amount of soot in our air by 42%, or that there’s vanishingly small [sic] room between the existing almost nothing and nothing.

Never mind, either, most of these fine particles are produced by construction sites, unpaved roads, and agriculture fields.

As much as 30% of all counties in the US…would have to block permitting of manufacturing facilities and new infrastructure projects.

So much for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s highly touted infrastructure project spending. There is an upside, though. John Kerry and his climatista syndicate would be moved closer to their goal of putting farming out of business.

What is this EPA’s limiting principle? It doesn’t have one.

This Is Why Unions Need to be Busted

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Iowa State Senator Adrian Dickey (R, Packwood) has introduced SF 2374, which is a bill that would

require each public employer to “submit to the [Public Employee Relations Board, or PERB] a list of employees in the bargaining unit” within 10 days of a union recertification election.

Never mind that Iowa’s taxpaying citizens have every right to know what their tax dollars are being used for and who’s being paid with them. Never mind, either, that the bill requires public employers, not unions, to submit lists of eligible employees. Never mind, either either, that unions insist on precisely this information when it’s useful for them; unions just call it card checking.

Jesse Case, Teamsters Local 238 Secretary-Treasurer, says that everything—including strikes—are on the table if that’s what it takes to stop the bill. He’s even proposing some wildly inappropriate, deliberately dangerous, union actions if his union doesn’t get its way:

Let’s say you’re a water treatment person and you get a call at three in the morning that says, “The water supply’s going down,” you’re not obligated to answer that call and that’s not a strike.
It’s not a work stoppage because you’re not getting paid at three o’clock in the morning to answer your phone. In fact, it’s against the law to make somebody answer their phone if they’re not receiving pay.
…
It’s [sic] there’s a blizzard moving in at three in the morning, you can go into work at seven or six or your regular scheduled time—call Senator Dickey to come plow your streets.

The union doesn’t care about the risks to businesses or lives; they want their way. The union doesn’t care that those hours already count as serious overtime, emergency or not, with serious extra pay associated.

These strike threats, these union flu work slowdowns, this you can’t have anything unless we get everything ideology, this legalized extortion—nice business/state/whatever you got there, be too bad if something was to happen to it—is exactly why today’s unions need to be busted.

The Iowa legislature and Governor need to stand tall and pass the bill and apply the consequences to these unions.

Oh, The Unfairness Of It All

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Much is being made of the existence of 29 February—that leap day in this leap year—and its effects on various costs and accounting requirements. Even The Wall Street Journal devoted 1,000 words to the subject last Friday. After all, this lengthening of the year by a quarter of a percent has all that inconvenience of figuring the costs—including whether those costs matter—of that extra day.

But these are just that: inconveniences, which corporate CFOs and small business owners have long since figured out how to handle.

But the unfairness of the day, the unequal treatment folks suffer through from the existence of that day, that gets ignored.

Salaried employees will work these 366 days for the same wage they get for other years’ 365 days. They’re working the extra day for free. Hourly wage employees, however, will get that extra day’s wage.

When I was stationed at a remote radar site in northern Alaska—a geographically isolated location that was, by design, a one year assignment at the end of which I’d be reassigned to a non-isolated location for a longer term—I was at that site during a leap year: I had to be there for 366 days. Folks whose assignments ended by 28 February or earlier, and folks who didn’t arrive until March or later only had to serve 365 days.

Folks born on 29 February of any year only get a birthday at a quarter of the rate folks born on any other day of the year get one. They must suffer the indignity of having artificial birthdays, if they’re to be allowed to celebrate as often as their buds who were born on 28 February or 1 March. Of course, in compensation, those 29 February babies age at a quarter of the rate that mere mortals do.

And last, and worst, my wife, my dear lady, has to go 366 days between Valentine’s Days, wondering for an extra day whether she still is my Valentine.