Category Archives: culture

Tax-Addicted Progressive-Democrats

Posted on by
Reply

Party has never seen a tax or an increase in existing taxes they don’t like. Washington and New York present examples.

Washington demonstrates the desperation for ever more tax fixes that Party needs to feed its collective addiction for OPM. The State’s Party is determined to impose a 9.9% tax on household income over $1 million a year.

On Monday lawmakers in Olympia pulled an all-nighter to push through the legislation, which [Progressive-]Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson has said he will sign. The bill passed the House 51-46 and goes back to the state Senate.

Never mind that the State’s citizens have repeatedly rejected income taxes in referendum after referendum. What do Party politicians care about the wishes of the small people of their State.

Never mind, either, that the State’s constitution forbids any form of income tax. What do Party politicians care about laws, however foundational, that get in their way?

And never mind that the State’s Senate Majority Leader, Manka Dhingra (D), campaigned for office on her opposition to income taxes, and now in office, actively supports this one. What do Party politicians care about truth or honesty?

Next is New York.

Democratic senators want to increase the state’s top income tax rate by 0.5 percentage points on households making more than $5 million. That would raise the top state-and-local rate in New York City to 15.3%. They also propose to raise the state’s corporate tax to 9% from 7.25% on businesses with more than $5 million income and let New York City raise its corporate tax rate to 10.62% from 8.85%. All told, large businesses would pay a nearly 20% tax rate in New York City.

And this one:

Governor Kathy Hochul, Democratic legislators, and union leaders held a rally over the weekend in support of rolling back the state’s 2012 pension reforms that raised the retirement age to 63 and requires workers to contribute between 3% and 6% of their paychecks to their pensions. “I’m fighting for a fair pension plan,” the Governor declared.

I’m not sure France is a useful model to emulate in the areas of work and retirement.

Taxes are a far more powerful addiction for Party politicians than are nicotine, or sugar, or opioids for us average Americans. Worse, Party’s addiction is severely damaging to our nation, whereas nicotine, sugar, and opioid addictions do their primary damage to the users.

It’s Not Him, It’s Me

Posted on by
Reply

The funeral for civil rights icon, ordained and practicing minister, and one-time Democratic Party Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson occurred last week. His family had explicitly asked that there be no politics involved, only celebrations of the man and his accomplishments.

“Who dat said dat,” said Progressive-Democrat ex-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Obama:

Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other, and to turn on each other. And that some Americans count more than others. And that some don’t even count at all. Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength[.]

Biden:

We got an administration that doesn’t share any of the values that we have, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating a little bit[.]

Biden added, and it wasn’t an aside; it seemed like an emphasis of the importance of the rest of his remarks,

I’m a hell of a lot smarter than most of you.

Progressive-Democrats can’t help themselves. They must—they’re driven to—turn every event they attend into a political diatribe against those who disagree with them, especially anything or anyone Trumpian.

On the other hand, the Evil Current President Donald Trump (R), who often clashed with Jackson and more often helped him, had this to say:

Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him. He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand. He loved his family greatly, and to them I send my deepest sympathies and condolences. Jesse will be missed!

Do we really need such self-centered, self-important persons in our republican democracy-structured government?

Target Placement vs Targeting

Posted on by
1

The US might have hit a girls school as collateral damage when it struck an IRGC compound in Minab, Iran, on the Minab River and 15 miles as an IRGC rocket flies from the Strait of Hormuz.

The school is located on the edge of a compound linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps…. There are indications the school building had previously been used as an IRGC headquarters….

There’s this, too, from IDF Spokesperson for International Media, LTC Nadav Shoshani. Scroll to the second video, which shows the extent of Khamenei’s underground bunker, its widespread and widely separated access points—and its placement in the heart of Tehran in the middle of a densely built up civilian neighborhood.

Such placement of military and critical governing facilities in the middle of civilian areas or adjacent to high propaganda value civilian facilities like hospitals and—in the present case—schools, using them and especially their occupants as shields, is typical of terrorist entities.

While collateral damage should be minimized, especially as that damage includes deaths of civilians and their children, that risk is both the moral and legal responsibility of the terrorists who create it and must not be allowed to leave the military targets unscathed.

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

Posted on by
Reply

UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

Posted on by
Reply

Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.