Category Archives: culture

A Party’s Legacy

Posted on by
Reply

David Marcus had a piece in Thursday’s Fox News regarding the Progressive-Democratic Party’s (Marcus still calls Party by its legacy name, Democratic Party) move as far Left as it has gone.  He posited two reasons for Party’s behavior.

The first is that by focusing their energy on the nation’s big cities, progressive Democrats can gain cultural power. While radical agendas on welfare, gender, and education, to name a few, may play better in New York and Los Angeles than in the heartland, it is reasonable to believe that controlling politics in urban centers will influence television, movies and news in ways that will eventually spread, especially to younger voters.

And

[A] second reason may be that the far left sees more benefit than harm in a shellacking for their party in the midterms. After all, the Democrats who will be swept out of office are not the progressives, but the moderates. By losing this election, the former can gain institutional power in the party, possibly for a generation.

There’s a third explanation, too, that’s corroborated by the Progressive-Democrats’ behavior with Obamacare. This third reason also dovetails nicely with Marcus’ second reason. Since the last election, Progressive-Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. With that, even with the slimness of their control, they’ve decided to go for it all and get their far Left (relative to the American political spectrum but center Left relative to Party) transformational, fundamentally socialist agenda enacted. They know that if they can get it rammed through, their policies won’t be repealed, even if they’re badly whipped in the next election. Just as with Obamacare.

Inadequate

Posted on by
Reply

Co-President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris are having trouble getting much of their political and (pseudo-)economic agenda passed. (Aside: failure isn’t a done deal; it would behoove the pundits on the right side of center to stop their crowing and predictions of landslide Republican elections in November.)

That’s not a failure of the agenda or of Biden-Harris or of Party managers in the House and Senate, though.

Not at all, insisted Paul Begala.

I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, okay?

And

In other words, those of us who want to say voting rights– we need to get to work. I do think Biden is putting everything behind this. But he needs– he needs better followers….

This is an example of the contempt Progressive-Democrats have had for us Americans all along. Here is Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement that has evolved the Democratic Party into its current form as the Progressive-Democratic Party:

But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

No Law

Posted on by
Reply

…but merely convenience. Australia’s immigration ministry makes Australia a nation ruled by men and not by law.

Immigration Minister Alex Hawke made clear in court documents concerning his second revocation of Novak Djokovic’s entry visa that the law counts for nothing.

Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption from rules that travelers to Australia must be vaccinated against Covid-19…. Hawke, who canceled Djokovic’s visa on Friday, said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.

Additionally,

Hawke didn’t refute Djokovic’s contention that he posed a negligible health risk, documents showed.

In his separate visa cancelation notice, though, Hawke said,

His [Djokovic’s] presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community[.]

Because government convenience is all that matters.

Australia isn’t the US, and Aussies can accept the style of governance they choose—or that gets imposed on them by the men and women in their government. That, though, does not make their decision to be ruled by men—a very hard choice to reverse—rather than by law any less foolish.

UPDATE: Australia’s federal court upheld Hawke’s order to revoke Djokovic’s visa and ordered the tennis star deported. The court’s reasoning was this:

Chief Justice James Allsop said the decision came down to whether Immigration Minister Ethan Hawke’s decision was “irrational or legally unreasonable.”
“It is no part of the function of the court to decide upon the merits or wisdom of the [government’s] decision,” Allsop explained.

That’s appropriate, as far as it goes. Court judges should rule on the legality of the matter, not interpose their own views of societal needs or their own feelz.

It doesn’t, though, detract from Hawke’s decision to act on his feelz and his views of government convenience being more important than law.

The Senate and the Republic

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR) has said the quiet part aloud (to coin a phrase). His immediate venue is the coming Progressive-Democrat effort to Federalize our nation’s elections, which by our Constitution are set by each State’s own legislatures and only modifiable under narrow circumstances by the Federal Congress.

You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging. One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.

No, these are not different “forces” at all. The functionality of our republic depends on our Federal Senate remaining the bipartisan body that it was designed to be. In the present case, that requires the Senate’s filibuster function to remain as it is, which enforces the Senate’s bipartisan nature.

It gets worse, though:

[Progressive-]Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules.

This is Party being openly, loudly and proudly racist. There are no minority voters or “other” voters or non-minority voters. There are only American voters. As a man said not so long ago,

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

Even if that man turned out actually to not believe his words, the concept he pretended to espouse is true, nonetheless.

But, then, this is just another aspect of the Progressive-Democrats’ drive to fundamentally change America. The next year, and the two years after that, are going to be very dangerous times for our Republic.

Child Abuse

Posted on by
2

Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

(I’m not aware that patrons as young as five years are allowed in New Orleans bars, but that’s another story.)

And, she orders:

Starting in January, you MUST ensure that your children are getting vaccinated!

This too closely approaches child abuse. There is virtually no risk to children—or from them to others—from the Wuhan Virus, especially from the mildest of all the variants, Omicron. It’s also true that the risk of dangerous side effects from the vaccines against the virus seems very small.

However.

We have more than two years of empirical data from a sample size that is the population of children on Earth with which to assess the level of risk to children from a Wuhan Virus infection. We have a much smaller set of data, collected over a much shorter period of time, with which to assess any risk to children of serious side effect from any of the virus vaccines.

Stipulate, though, that the vaccines’ serious side effect risk really is quite small. The comparison of interest is not whether the vaccines have an absolute level of risk in isolation of other factors or risks. The proper comparison is the level of risk to a child from being unvaccinated compared with the risk to the child of serious side effect from the vaccine.

If the two levels of risk are comparable—and they seem to be, even with the so-far assessed optimistic side effect risk—then the risk from the vaccine is not worth the risk to a child from going unvaccinated.

Forcing that second risk onto the child is too risky, to the point of abuse.