Category Archives: politics

There’s Always an Excuse

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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?

Dealing with the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China has decided that the American company Nvidia has violated PRC anti-trust laws and is holding the company hostage in trade negotiations with the US.

China’s antitrust regulator said Monday that a preliminary investigation found Nvidia violated the country’s antimonopoly law in connection with an acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing, and it didn’t elaborate on the alleged violations or say whether it would punish Nvidia.

The PRC is centering its case on Nvidia’s commitment to not cut the PRC off from its chips as a condition of PRC approval of the acquisition. That might make a basis for a legitimate anti-trust beef; however:

Since 2022, the US. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial-intelligence chips to China.

Here is the PRC threatening an American company for its compliance with American law.

There are now two strong reasons for American companies to walk away from the PRC and discontinue all business with PRC-domiciled companies or within the PRC under any guise. One is the overt interference with the domestic affairs of our nation. If the PRC doesn’t like our government’s block of Nvidia, et al., selling their best chips into the PRC, its beef is with our government, not with the American businesses it tries to take hostage in its “negotiations” with our government.

The other reason is the PRC’s presumption that it should have veto authority over whether an American company acquires, or otherwise takes a stake in, any non-PRC-domiciled company. If American companies stop doing business in/with the PRC, then the PRC has no approval/disapproval authority over acquisitions—it becomes irrelevant. And that’s as it should be with an enemy nation.

Obamacare Subsidies and Appropriations Bills

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen and Senators are attempting to extort Republicans into surrendering on extending/restoring Progressive-Democrat-passed (in 2021) Obamacare expanded subsidies.

Unfortunately, they’ll likely succeed, as too many Republicans in each house are too timid to stand their ground.

Never mind that if those Republicans would crawl out from under their desks, they easily could make the case that any government shutdown would be (and after the realization, was) the sole doing of those Progressive-Democrats. It’s those Party members, after all, who threatened to close our government if they weren’t meekly obeyed and who in the realization did close our government.

These Republicans think they face regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ announcement is a chimera, too. The Federal government never really shuts down. With current tax law, funds come flowing in to Federal coffers are plenty for the Federal government to keep paying, on schedule, almost all of existing Federal outlays. The losses from any supposed shutdown would be primarily via Federal contracts with businesses that provide services to the Feds, but most of these businesses would be made whole under the terms of those same contracts.

The larger, underlying problem this extortion exposes, though, is the Republicans’ failure, in their aggregate, to pass all of the dozen separate appropriations bills they’re nominally required to pass every year. These appropriations bills are the actual spending bills that commit actual dollars that the Federal government has committed through its various allocation bills, which is where the government says what it wants to fund. Appropriations are those funds.

Had the Republicans in Congress actually passed those dozen bills on schedule, or at least by the end of the current fiscal year (which has another week left, so theoretically they still could), as they promised at the start of the year and of which they’ve only passed three or four, there would be no risk of a shutdown, and the Progressive-Democrats would have no extortion bricks to throw threw government windows.

Will the Republicans learn this lesson for the second year of this Congressional session? They never have in the past. I’m not holding my breath for the future.

Not Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s War

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President Donald Trump (R) is dead [sic] wrong on this one.

This is not Trump’s war (it would never have started if I was president!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war[.]

No, this is not Zelenskyy’s war, either. This is, plainly, Biden’s and Putin’s war. It’s especially Putin’s war—he’s the one who invaded, and compounding his responsibility, he sent the invasion in utterly without provocation. Ex-President Joe Biden (D), played a critical role in Putin’s decision to invade when Biden gave Putin permission to do so, saying that a small incursion would be OK.

On the other hand, Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is fighting for its existence as a sovereign, independent nation that is responsible for its own existence.

Trump is right, though, on this much:

[I]t would never have started if I was president!

“socialize the agricultural system”

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That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.