Category Archives: culture

A Crackdown

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Or maybe a purge beginning. Fourteen (so far) Hong Kong protestors now are under arrest by the People’s Republic of China Hong Kong police for their rudeness in objecting to the PRC satrap government’s behavior.

Among those arrested Saturday were 81-year-old activist and former lawmaker Martin Lee and democracy advocates Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Au Nok-hin. Police also arrested media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who founded the local newspaper Apple Daily.
The sweeping crackdown amid a coronavirus pandemic is based on charges of unlawful assembly stemming from huge rallies against proposed China extradition legislation….

Naturally, the PRC has defended those arrests and the West’s objections to them. Here’s the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong:

It is completely wrong that the UK Foreign Office spokesperson has distorted the truth by painting unauthorized assemblies as “peaceful protests….”

Because, after all, when a Government official uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean—neither more nor less.

This is what the Republic of China can look forward to. “One country, two systems” really means that second system is subjugation. And the dictionary will have only Government-approved definitions.

在中国, Newspeak 还活得很好.

Flip-Flops

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These two paragraphs in a Friday Wall Street Journal pretty much illustrates the whole problem of divisiveness in our nation and the Left’s role as the driving force in that.

So it went this week as President Trump popped off that he had “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. Governors and the media shrieked that he was triggering a constitutional crisis by acting like the dictator they have long claimed he wants to be.
Then on Thursday evening Mr Trump issued new guidelines for ending the lockdowns that put the decision to reopen in the hands of governors. The Democratic-media line immediately flipped to say Mr Trump was refusing to lead and abdicating responsibility. Mr Trump’s “absolute authority” impulse was wrong on the law and self-damaging, as he so often is. But even when Mr Trump turns around and acts as they prefer, his opponents denounce him and predict catastrophe.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this that the Progressive-Democratic Party has no policies in whose merits they believe enough to tout and to campaign on; all they have is “No” to anything Trumpian.

With their behavior in Congress blocking—now twice; although after four days, they agreed a compromise on the first effort—any Federal aid to our nation’s workers whose employers have been so broadly reduced by political responses to the Wuhan Virus situation, Party is demonstrating that it has something more broad than that: “No” to anything Republican.

Even if they have push one claim one day and its opposite the next. “No” is the word.

Employment Insurance

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This is Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s latest brain…storm.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee proposes getting all 50 states to adopt and dramatically scale up short-time compensation programs—also known as work sharing—in which businesses and companies in distress keep workers employed at reduced hours, with the federal government helping to make up the difference in workers’ wages.

That’s not going to do anything other than shift a part of a worker’s pay from the company employing him to us taxpayers.  With Uncle Sugar—that’s us—picking up part of the tab, companies would have no incentive to keep workers employed fulltime, much less pay them a full wage. They would have an incentive to claim this or that distress.

Such a move also would distort cost-signaling by masking the true cost of labor to a company. That would flow, in turn, to inaccurate price signaling in the market place, since the prices buyers would see would not be tied to the seller’s true costs.

This is just another example of Progressive-Democrats looking to expand their welfare cage and gild it with taxpayer money.

Too Polite to Say

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In an interview on Monday night’s The Ingraham Angle and cited by Fox News, Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) had this about the House Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism and abuse of the present Wuhan Virus situation to push their own progressivism:

[H]e has spoken off-the-record to some congressional Democrats who want to get back to work but are held in line by party leadership.

The Congressman is too courteous. If those Progressive-Democrats really are being held back, it’s not by Party leadership. It’s by their own cowardice.

Full stop.

A Progressive-Democrat Governor’s View

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…of the intelligence and responsibility of American citizens, including particularly Kentucky citizens.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) has said he’s going to identify, track, and isolate Kentucky citizens who dare go to their church’s Easter services. His excuse—and that’s all it is, a cynical rationalization—for his government’s surveillance of a broad swath of citizens is the present Wuhan Virus situation.

It’s for the greater good, you see.

I hear people say, “It’s my choice”. Well, it’s not the person next to you’s choice….

That’s plainly not true. It was the person next to you’s clear choice to be there, also, knowing full well the nature and the proximity of the company both of those individuals, and it was the clear choice of all of the rest of the congregation.

Neither is there anything in either the Free Exercise Clause or the Establishment Clause that says “except for when a State governor thinks better.” This is simply a confluence of two Progressive-Democrat ideologies: American citizens are too grindingly stupid to make their own decisions or to act intelligently (here, to govern their own post-service behavior), and religious freedom is just a phrase that’s gone out of vogue because, after all, the Constitution isn’t binding on anything.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) is on the right track:

Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here[.]

The Progressive-Democrat Beshear has no faith in the citizens of Kentucky or their ability to act intelligently, he wants Government to identify and surveil them and then control them, and he has no respect for Law.

Kentuckians might want to remember this at the next election for Governor, in three more years.