Category Archives: culture

There’s Always an Excuse

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that Bureau of Labor Statistics honcho Erika McEntarfer was fired over labor reports that reflected wildly inaccurate data and that necessitated radically large corrections in subsequent months. Those data may have been fudged, as President Donald Trump (R) suggests, or they may have resulted from badly inaccurate and incomplete data collection by the BLS’ periodic polling processes.

Now she’s speaking out.

While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.

And making self-serving excuses. She took office in January 2024. DOGE didn’t start in until early 2025.

Two questions, then: the first is what progress had she made on her improvements in the intervening year? What bureaucratic impediments had been interfering with those efforts, and what had she been doing about those impeding bureaucrats?

McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.

She spent that whole year “preparing to” help? When was she going actually to get started? When was she going to start leading the effort rather than “helping” it?

The second question is in what way had DOGE been interfering with her efforts, and what resources had she diverted from stats improvement to dealing with—mostly interfering with—DOGE’s efforts?

“Political Violence Has Become a Terrifying Fact of American Life”

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the headline. What it doesn’t include, and what the underlying article goes on to not include, is that the political violence is almost exclusively from the Left.

  • Then-Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) shot and nearly killed at a rally
  • Progressive-Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer (NY), on the Supreme Court Building front steps, threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of the named
  • Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) accusing Republicans and Donald Trump of autocracy and dictatorship, followed shortly by a Leftist’s mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen practicing baseball
  • Antifa’s attacks on Conservative newsman Andy Ngo
  • Antifa’s attacks on Christian rallies
  • Attack against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016
  • Months later another Leftist tried to steal a police officer’s pistol with which to shoot Trump at a rally
  • A 2017 attempt by a Leftist to ram a forklift into a Trump motorcade
  • A 2018 mailing of a ricin-laced envelope to Trump
  • George Floyd riots during which Minneapolis’ mayor held off sending in National Guard to quell the riots
  • Summer of Love in Seattle
  • Riots and attacks against Federal officers and buildings in Portland while Portland’s mayor objected to the Federal government sending National Guard troops to protect those Federal buildings
  • 2021 attack on the White House by a Black Nationalist, during which a Capitol Police officer was killed and another injured
  • Two murder 2024 attempts against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump
  • Death threats and swatting made against
    • US District Judge Aileen Cannon
    • New York County DA Alvin Bragg
    • US District Judge Tanya Chutkan
  • Assaults against ICE agents as the go about enforcing immigration law, particularly against violent illegal aliens
  • Murder of Charlie Kirk, a Republican podcaster, speaker, fund-raiser, founder of Turning Point USA
  • The ammunition by the Kirk murderer inscribed with “anti-fascist” and transgender slogans
  • Death threats leveled against Kirk’s widow

Then there’s what Jonathon Turley calls “rage rhetoric,” which Leftists insist is provocative of physical violence, and on that, those Leftists are correct. It’s just that the rhetoric is mostly from their fellow Leftists. The following are in addition to Schumer’s and Sanders’ rage rhetoric. These have set the environment that justifies, in the Left’s collective mind, the violence they inflict.

  • 2022, then-President Joe Biden called the MAGA movement “semi-fascism.”
  • Vice President Kamala Harris yokked it up with Ellen DeGeneres about killing Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, or former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) declared “Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people.”
  • Congressman Jamie Raskin (D, MD) said that [Elon] Musk and Trump were conducting a “rapidly expanding and accelerating coup.”
  • Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) said that a “coup” was being carried out.
  • Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said Musk was “taking away everything we have.”
  • Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D, NJ) said “God d—it shut down the Senate!…WE ARE AT WAR!”
  • House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) called on his fellow Progressive-Democrats to fight “in the streets.”

That’s just a taste.

Then there’s the Left’s cancel war against the Right, which while not kinetic is often just as destructive of careers and lives.

Silly Question

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic Party Zohran Mamdani now claims he will “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada. The editors at the WSJ wonder

if he really understood [the term and the phrase], wouldn’t he go further and outright condemn such language?

It’s a silly question. Mamdani’s claim is empty rhetoric, intended solely to garner votes, with nothing whatsoever to do with any sincere conversion of understanding.

Mamdani fully understands the phrase and the term; that’s why encouraged it in the first place, and that’s why he continues, consciously and deliberately, to refuse to condemn it and to consciously and deliberately to weasel-word his way around questions of why he will not condemn.

This is who Party chose for their mayoral candidate, and this is who New York City residents are on the cusp of electing as their mayor.

The city is about to get an up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have a socialist who also is an anti-Semitic bigot running their show. The rest of our nation is about to get an object lesson in the outcomes of broad socialism and rank bigotry at the top of a city government.

Hopefully, it awaken the rest of our nation and take us back toward the virtuous people that one of our Founders readily acknowledged is a necessary prerequisite for a republic and for a population to govern itself.

I support and endorse Mamdani’s election for precisely that lesson.

Willful Ignorance

Posted on by
Reply

Or preferring her Newspeak Dictionary definitions over those in actual American English dictionaries.

That’s Arizona Progressive-Democrat Representative Yassamin Ansari’s view. In response to the hue and cry over her terming illegal aliens members of her constituency, she had this:

So, I didn’t realize this was such a controversy until the right-wing media started attacking me for using the word, so I Googled the word constituent. The definition of constituent is somebody who is part of a community, doesn’t matter what their legal status is,

She Googled for the definition of “constituent.” She could have consulted an actual dictionary of the American English language, but she chose not to. ‘Course, if she had, she would have seen her narrative collapse around her. This is what Merriam-Webster, for instance, has to say about the American English meaning of the term:

constituent
1 : a member of a constituency
pledged to help her elderly constituents

Following that first and thus primary definition over to constituency, we get this first and primary definition:

constituency
1 a : a body of citizens entitled to elect a representative (as to a legislative or executive position)
the governor’s liberal constituency

Citizens. Not illegal aliens. Even the second part of that first definition lends no support for Ansari’s Newspeak definition:

b : the residents in an electoral district
The senator’s constituency includes a large minority population.

Since illegal aliens are not legally resident, they are outside even the residents of an electoral district.

Inconvenient facts are, to a Party member, inconvenient.

Rights from Men, Not from God

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker