Category Archives: morality

Rhetoric

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There has been on Wednesday a deliberate, carefully targeted attack against a collection of Republican Congressmen practicing for a Congressional baseball game that was intended to be a bipartisan fund-raiser (the Progressive-Democrats were practicing their own team at another venue) that injured five, including the Republican House Whip who is the third most powerful House Republican, who was seriously injured.

In the aftermath we got Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) making a tendentious speech on the Senate floor proclaiming his regret over this shooting, and we got the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) making a similarly overwrought speech on the House floor.  Both called for bipartisanship and expressed their sympathy for the shooting victims.

Other current Progressive-Democrats also say they decry this violence.

These people are at the pinnacle of their careers; they’ve reached the top echelons of the political life and career: they’re enormously intelligent.  As politicians, too, words are their stock in trade: they choose the words and phrases they use to make their points extremely carefully.

These people also have routinely held themselves and their party out as knowing better than the rest of us—that’s what underlies their position that Government will solve our problems and must do so because we cannot handle our own lives and situations.

Now: Progressive-Democrats in Congress past and present have for years openly called Republicans unpatriotic, hostage-takers, terrorists.  They say Republicans are racist, xenophobic, homophobic, irredeemably deplorable.

The physical impact of their rhetoric has become clear over the last couple of years: their followers have physically assaulted Republicans at their political campaign rallies, including one charging onto the stage to attack then-candidate Donald Trump.  Their student followers routinely attack speakers—even fellow students and professors—who disagree with them.

Now this deliberate, carefully targeted shooting attack against a large gathering of Republican Congressmen.

Can anyone really believe these politicians didn’t—and don’t—know what they were and are saying?  Can anyone truly think that these politicians didn’t and don’t know beforehand that their carefully incendiary rhetoric would lead to violence of the murderous type that occurred Wednesday?

It’s certainly true that incitement to riot or murder is no excuse for the riot or the murder (thankfully only attempted, Wednesday).

But it’s also true that there’s no excuse for the incitement to the riot or the murder.  And the Progressive-Democrats have been doing exactly that.

Timidity

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A group of perpetually-offended atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are threatening to sue a small Wisconsin town because of two welcome signs.

Here’s an example of the signs, which have been up 50 years or more:

The churches extend the welcome, not the town’s government in the name of any church or all of them.

Of what are these folks so terrified?  There’s nothing stopping them from putting up their own welcome sign: “Atheists of Oconomowoc Welcome You.”  If the town’s government objected to that, only then might there be an actual beef.

Or: these folks are just terrified of how foolish they’ll look in an open contest of ideas, so they’re suing in the hope of using that to extort acquiescence.

I trust the town of Oconomowoc will show themselves made of sterner stuff than these snowflakes and welcome them into court—and then refuse to settle the matter.

A Party’s True Character

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A Party’s True Character

The Progressive-Democratic Party leader of the time, President Woodrow Wilson, said of segregation, “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is the party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party that made national minimum wage laws for the explicit purpose of keeping blacks on the plantation—literally—instead of migrating north and competing for jobs by being willing to work for less than white union members were.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of racist and sexist affirmative action programs.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of the welfare cage that keeps our poor, of any stripe, trapped in poverty and dependent on government handouts.

Jason Riley in The Wall Street Journal has some insights on the current nature of the matter.

[Now] race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups.

And

College campuses offer near-daily examples of this liberal devolution on racial matters. The most prominent recent episode involves Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, who has come under fire from students and fellow faculty members for criticizing the school’s “Day of Absence” protest, which involved whites quitting campus for the day.

And

Sadly, these antics have become commonplace in recent years. Students at the University of Wisconsin have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks. At the University of Michigan, a student group that previously complained about the lack of racial “diversity” and “inclusion” at the school has since requested a safe space on campus reserved for students of color to gather. At the University of Missouri, only students of color were invited to participate in a “die-in” protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

And

Last year, at the urging of the school’s black student union, California State University, Los Angeles began offering segregated housing for black students. The University of Connecticut, the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley are among the colleges that have similar arrangements in place.

And

This year, Harvard held its first-ever commencement ceremony for black graduate students. The New York Times reported that racially segregated end-of-year ceremonies like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.

The Progressive students of the campuses and those institutions’ management are demanding exactly what that Progressive icon, Woodrow Wilson, promised them: the “protection” of segregation.  This is what the Party’s Big Government-mandated dependency has wrought.

Some Thoughts on the Paris Climate Accord

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Some information provided by Matthew Dalton in The Wall Street Journal is illuminating, if not in the way he—or the WSJ—might have intended.

The US’s willingness under the Obama administration to propose major emissions reductions and put money on the table helped solidify global consensus behind the deal. It also helped persuade politicians world-wide of the need to seek more ambitious cuts and channel more money into the fight against global warming, officials and experts say.

Our willingness to put money on the table “helped persuade politicians world-wide [to] channel more money into the fight against global warming” contains a couple of disingenuousities.  One is that the greater amount of money to be channeled is American taxpayers’ money, since the other nearly 200 nations party to the thing aren’t putting up much money at all—in fact, large polluters like India pledged themselves to do nothing under the accord until some trillions of dollars in “foreign aid” had been transferred to them.  Pakistan, unmentioned by Dalton, pledged to “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.”  But that only defines the word “peak;” it commits to nothing—other than to be one of the receivers of (American taxpayers’) OPM.

The other disingenuousity is the cynically presented strawman of “the fight against global warming.”  The folks objecting to our leaving the accord will have to play with their dolly without me.  There’s no fight against global warming.  There is an effort to mitigate human activity’s impact on climate change, even though that impact has not had its significance established, or even suggested in any credible way.  Even the direction of climate change is not established: it was just a short time ago that the same Climate Federal Funding Industry was trying to raise funding by frightening us into worrying about the coming Ice Age.  (This is also the same collection of rent-seekers who tried to raise money with fear mongering about catastrophic global overpopulation.)

There’s also this from Dalton:

Despite the strong reaction of world leaders, the US’s financial contributions have been relatively small so far and its decision to withdraw doesn’t necessarily halt America’s progress on the emissions front.

Indeed.  The uproar is over the fact that the others won’t have such easy access to OPM—us American taxpayers’ money.  Never mind that in their bleating, these “world leaders” ignore the simple fact that we’re the leaders in cutting both pollution and CO2 emissions—we’re already at 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, and it hasn’t even been established that this plant food even is a pollutant.

And this:

When they signed the accord, governments acknowledged that the most difficult work was left unfinished. The pledges to slash emissions made by more than 190 nations fell far short of the reductions scientists say are needed to avoid the most damaging effects of climate change.

That bit of dishonesty speaks for itself.

Looks like President Trump isn’t as dumb or irresponsible as these worthies claim.  The Paris Climate Accord was, and is, nothing but cynical virtue signaling by the intended recipients of OPM and by the developed nation leaders’ who promised pennies of their own and dollars of ours.

Medicaid Transfers

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It’s well understood that Medicaid badly wants reform.  My own view is to give it back to the States by reducing Federal fund transfers to them until the transfers are zero, which also would eliminate Federal strings jerking the States to do everything the same way, the Federal way.

There are lots of paths to that end, and there are a number of other reforms that would help the situation at least a little.  The House plan for repeal and replace of Obamacare, the first step of which was the American Health Care Act, has one such step, the repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

Expanding State participation in Federally provided—with those strings attached—funds—expanding Medicaid—as a number State governors have done, is not one of those reforms.  Not even for Republican governors.

Sixteen GOP governors represent states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and they are generally loath to see the program cut back.

Nobody forced these persons to mainline the Federal funds drug. They stuck that needle in their veins and addicted themselves, with no outside pressure at all.

These guys are badly mistaken, and they’ve only made things worse for the constituents for whom they claim to work.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, one of those 16, thinks the expansion is just peachy keen; he’s still riding the high from his needle.  He says that “600,000 Michiganders have gained coverage and the state’s hospitals have saved about $300 million.”

What he’s carefully ignoring, though, is how much money Michiganders and those hospitals sent to the Federal government in various taxes and fees to contribute to 49 other States’ Medicaid program participation.  How many of those Michiganders could have been helped and how much money could Michigan’s hospitals have saved had the State kept those monies, instead?  How much would those Michigan citizens and those Michigan hospitals have benefited, had they been able to keep their money—their money, not the State or Federal government’s money—instead of paying all those taxes and fees to the Federal government?