Category Archives: culture

True Colors

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The Progressive-Democrats, especially those in the Senate, have shown their true colors as they voted last Friday to shut down the Federal government, voting to block a temporary funding agreement that would have kept the government open for another month.  I wrote earlier about that shutdown’s practical effects.

Here’s what the Progressive-Democrats voted to kill: six years of funding for CHIP, so now some millions of children in our poverty-level families will have no access to health insurance.  DACA reform so that those illegal immigrant children could have some hope for their future.

CHIP funding was in the stop-gap bill, but now there’s no funding for it, and the program has expired.

DACA reform was not in the bill, having nothing to do with funding, but the Progressive-Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) demanded it be included or there would be no votes from his Party (in the event, five Progressive-Democrats from Republican States whose seats are in jeopardy in this fall’s elections, knowing their Party would kill the funding, cynically cast their meaningless votes for the bill).  It didn’t matter to these worthies that DACA had until early March to be negotiated or that there already exists bipartisan agreement on the outline and substance of a DACA proposal that could have been debated and voted up by the end of January in a separate bill.  Schumer and his Party cronies demanded their DACA right damn now.  Their attitude has badly poisoned any future DACA negotiations, perhaps fatally.

It gets worse.  There was nothing in the bill to which Progressive-Democrats actually objected.  It funded the government for a time, which the Prog-Dems claim they want.  It funded CHIP, which the Prog-Dems claim they want.  It funded defense, which even Prog-Dems claim they want.  The clean funding bill just didn’t have all the other, unrelated, things the Prog-Dems also demanded.

When Schumer went to the White House late Friday before the vote to deal personally with President Trump, he went with a Christmas tree of Progressive-Democrat demands beyond just DACA for inclusion in the stop-gap bill, including for instance, bailing out public union pension funds, added spending on opoid programs, and on and on.  That Christmas tree is what Schumer was talking about when he said after the meeting that progress had been made, but “we still have a good number of disagreements.”  All of these extras also could have been negotiated and voted on in the ensuing period.

Not good enough.  The Progressive-Democrats voted to shut down the government because the stop-gap didn’t have DACA and Schumer’s Christmas tree.  Party ego before national weal.

Remember this next fall.

Update: The Senate, on another cloture vote later this morning, voted 81-18 to end the filibuster and bring the bill to the floor for an up or down vote. The bill is changed trivially–the funding period is good for three weeks instead of four–but otherwise, it’s the same bill.  Because of that period change, though, it has to go back to the House, where I expect it’ll be voted up forthwith and sent to the President for prompt signing.

In return, Senate Republicans promised negotiations on DACA and on immigration and a vote on DACA. The DACA debate has been going on, all along, as noted above.

Businesses Behind the Tree

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California wants the Federal tax reform-saved money for itself, and they want a State Constitutional amendment to make the seizure permanent.

A proposed Assembly Constitutional Amendment by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty (D) and Phil Ting (D) would create a tax surcharge on California companies making more than $1 million….

The Progressive-Democrats claim the money would go to “programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families,” but that’s just tear-jerking.  The State’s government would divert the monies to favored programs at convenience.  That’s minor, though.

The point of the proposal is to take the money from business—the surcharge is a tax of fully 50% of business’ Federal tax cut—because Government Knows Better, and business doesn’t deserve it, anyway.  Nor did they earn it.  Government did that.

Don’t tax you, don’t tax me.  Tax that business behind the tree.  That’s not quite what Russell Long (D, LA) said all those years ago, but California’s new tax proposal is close in spirit.  What the Progressive-Democrats in California’s legislature and governor’s mansion are missing, though, is another sentiment of Long’s regarding tax breaks for businesses:

I have become convinced you’re going to have to have capital if you’re going to have capitalism.

This is an understanding completely absent in the Progressive-Democratic Party.

A Bad Deal

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And all for the sake of a personal legacy, apparently.

Republic of Korea President Moon Jae-in has cut an Olympic-sized deal with northern Korea concerning the latter’s participation in next month’s Winter Olympics.  According to the deal,

South Korean athletes and performers [will go] north of the demilitarized zone for training at a North Korean ski resort and a cultural event at a scenic mountain resort.

Further,

[T]he two Koreas will walk into the opening ceremony of next month’s Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, under one flag—the unification flag that depicts all of Korea. The two countries’ women’s ice hockey teams will unite to form a joint Korean squad.

It’ll be interesting to see how many ROK athletes and performers will be willing to go north and the quality of those who do.  It’ll also be interesting to see what the single flag looks like; here’s what the “reunification” flag looked like at the 2006 Winter Olympics:

It’ll be even more interesting to see how many of the RoK women’s hockey team actually show up.  There’s considerable disgruntlement among the team, Olympic athletes generally, and athletic sphere leadership over Moon’s agreement here, both over the agreement and over the RoK players who will be cut or denied ice time to make room for the north’s players.

And: the agreement seems not to have been done with athletes’ input or even warning that it was coming.  Moon certainly is setting his legacy.

An Exam

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President Donald Trump had his annual physical earlier this week, and at his request, a mental acuity exam was administered to him as well.  The White House doctor, Navy Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who performed the exams was the same White House physician for George Bush the Younger and for Barack Obama.  The results were presented by Jackson at a Tuesday presser, and at Trump’s insistence, Jackson stayed to answer, completely—no doctor patient confidentiality—every question the NLMSM (my term; Trump has a different term for that subset of the nation’s press) might ask.

In short, Trump has high cholesterol and needs to take his cholesterol meds, and he’s overweight.  Trump also got a perfect score on the mental acuity exam.

In long, the press spent an hour quizzing Jackson about the exam’s results.  An hour to get the results of an exam.

That hour demonstrates the NLMSM’s desperation to find something—anything—with which to smear the President.  It’ll be interesting to see if the NLMSM will let go of this particular bit of dishonesty.

Nope.  Jackson hadn’t even left the briefing room when MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow put out this.

You know what? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and raise the possibility that this statement was not written by the White House physician. […]

I’m not basing my skepticism on the authorship of this statement on the “Trumpiness” of the statement itself. The reason I think this might not have actually been written by the White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, is because that is not how your spell Ronny Jackson.

This is the offending tweet that formed the stuff of Maddow’s fevered nightmare:

Jackson’s misspelled first name proves—proves!—that the whole thing is a stinking lie and Trump, according to the NLMSM, really is crazier than a hoot owl.

And a Newsweek headline, via Yahoo!:

Trump at Risk for a Heart Attack With Dangerous Weight and Skyrocketing Cholesterol

The Party Wants No Deal

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The Progressive-Democrats in Congress don’t want a deal, neither on the budget nor on DACA.  They want the Federal government shut down so they can blame the Republicans for it during this fall’s elections.  They also want to keep the DACA situation and immigration in general alive as a debating question for those same elections.

Democrats said Mr Trump’s dismissal of “shithole countries” in Africa in a closed meeting last week with lawmakers positioned him as the person who upset the negotiations.

Notice that.  The Progressive-Democrats are doing two things here: masquerading a claim of certain words being spoken as a fact that those words were spoken, and then using those words as an excuse to refuse to deal on DACA rather than actually dealing on DACA.

That the Progressive-Democrats do not want a DACA deal at all is illustrated by a third thing to notice, a matter that’s being carefully ignored by both those Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.  Such words spoken publicly would be damaging to our national reputation; on that we’re all agreed.  What’s ignored is that, having been said in that closed meeting (if they were said), no one outside the meeting would know about them and no damage would be done—but for a meeting participant (Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) comes to mind) running screaming to the press as soon as the meeting broke up to bruit about those words.  This is a deliberate move to blow up any DACA negotiations.

Nor is a DACA agreement needed in the current budget debate.  President Donald Trump’s rescission of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) DHS memorandum gave Congress, where such a matter belongs, until next March to enact a DACA program legislatively, or explicitly decline to do so, before Trump’s rescission takes effect.  The lack of urgency is further well-known to the Progressive-Democrats: a Federal judge has blocked Trump’s order.  Demanding a DACA deal in the current budget debate is simply a mechanism to block a budget deal.

Too, the Progressive-Democratic Party must come before children.  That Party is more important than children is demonstrated by two outcomes of the Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism.  The DACA children will get nothing from any government shutdown.  The Progressive-Democrats’ rejection of a budget deal also will reject the CHIP program, whose funding is renewed for six years, in the deal on offer.  Millions of children will be denied access to health insurance.

Remember that in the coming elections.