Category Archives: culture

Republican Gadflies

Posted on by
Reply

Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase.  But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) similarly demands a broader bill right damn now, but he, too, has chosen to offer no tactics for getting his bill past a Senate Progressive-Democrat filibuster.  He’s just using the copout excuse that that’s the Senate’s problem.  Oh, and Jordan also declines to identify the value of a bill that can’t be passed.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) at least has offered an actual plan, but he, too, has declined to identify how he expects to get his plan past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

These gadflies keep demanding that everyone else put up (these three’s demands) or shut up.  It’s time these three put up; otherwise, they’re just porch dogs, yapping from the safety of their stoops.

Appalling

Posted on by
Reply

Students at an Iowa high school have apologized to a neighboring school for wearing red, white and blue to a recent basketball game.

The Valley High School students’ USA-themed attire was seen as offensive because some of the rival school’s players were from refugee families.

Because we shouldn’t celebrate the nation that gives these refugees succor.

No.  The administration members of West Des Moines’ Valley High are behaving in a despicably offensive manner, and they should apologize to our great nation at large, and then they should be terminated for cause.  Calling national colors racist is itself stinkingly racist.

Full stop.

Empty Rhetoric

Posted on by
Reply

A Progressive-Democrat attacked a journalist who was covering the latest CPAC convention…for his hairstyle.  Samantha Bee, the host of Full Frontal on TBS, took one look at the journalist and ran a segment in her show that included imagery of the journalist, who had a hairdo that might have been called a high-top fade in other circumstances (imagery at the link) and the remark

This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced by Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair[.]

Never mind that the man is fighting an aggressive brain cancer, stage 4 glioblastoma.  That didn’t matter to Bee.

Not until the man’s sister call Bee out, anyway.  Then she tweeted that mealy-mouth pseudo-apology with its risible excuse.  There are two things about that “apology.”  One is that she did know because like any responsible adult Hollywood denizen, Bee had her intern check on the journalist and his hairstyle before putting her segment together, and then she ran it anyway.

The other thing is that, in her haste to demonize anyone not of the Left, she didn’t bother to check any facts related to the matter; she just ran with her segment.

But wait—there’s more.  The journalist she attacked turns out to be a registered Democrat.

The paranoia of the Left has gone so far out of control they even attack their own in their knee-jerk lashouts.

Privacy

Posted on by
Reply

Cross-posted from my comment on the matter at Grim’s Hall and based on a CNN article.

From Comey’s quote as provided by CNN:

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America….

That’s his (cynically offered, because I don’t agree he’s either as stupid or as ignorant as he’d have to be otherwise) straw man; he’ll have to play with his dolly without me.

He also has distorted (deliberately, if not from his lack of understanding, coming from Government’s perspective as he does) what the Founders wrought:

Our founders struck a bargain that is at the center of this amazing country of ours and has been for over two centuries.

No. Not even close. Our Founders allocated to the Federal government a strictly limited set of authorities and powers to execute them. There was, and is, no bargain other than the one that exists between any employer and employee: do your job, or I’ll fire you. And as one of our social compact documents puts it on two occasions, at gunpoint if needs be.

Full stop.

Perhaps this distorted view of things is near the core of his failures to perform–three times–vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and again since the inauguration.

Sanctuary Cities and Federal Funding

Posted on by
1

San Francisco asked a federal judge Wednesday to block President Trump’s order threatening to strip federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities that bar police from enforcing immigration laws.

This suit has a good chance of succeeding.  In 1987’s South Dakota v Dole, the Supreme Court ruled (in a dispute over the State’s minimum drinking age and Federal highway funds transfers to the State) that the Federal government cannot withhold already agreed Federal funds from a State in order to coerce State acquiescence with Federal wishes.  Funds can be withheld to “persuade,” but the withheld funds must be related to the question at hand rather than a blanket withholding, and the amount withheld cannot be coercive in its size, but only persuasive.  Without naming a threshold for the amount, the Court held that the 5% withholding imposed by the Federal government was not coercive.

Right or wrong, that’s the law of the land as things stand.  Congress and the President will have to statutorily overrule the Supreme Court to enable such a broad withholding of Federal funds from San Francisco.

On the other hand, stopping sending all Federal funds to all cities altogether would bypass the Court’s ruling (although legislation still would be necessary to stop completely the funds transfers).  In the end, we have to ask why the citizens of Illinois, for instance, should have to pay any part of, let’s say, San Francisco’s expenses at all.

It’s true enough that we’re all in this republican democracy nation of ours together, and so we support each other.  But that mutual support includes cities like San Francisco not creating themselves as burdens on the rest of our nation with its irresponsible, profligate spending while demanding OPM to pay for that spending.