Category Archives: politics

Censorship

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Facebook’s “Review Board” has decided that Facebook should continue censoring former President Donald Trump (R). They also issued some pap about how Facebook wasn’t clear enough about why, or for how long the censoring should occur, but the bottom line is—keep on keepin’ on censoring.

This is Mark Zuckerberg continuing his censorship of those political figures of whom he disapproves. (The putative independence of Facebook’s review board from Facebook is an irrelevancy, since Facebook has a controlling role in appointing board members.)

This, also, is another example of why the big tech companies, of which Facebook is a canonical example, need to be disassembled and the separated pieces regulated as utilities or as public accommodations.

It’s only Money

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And it’s not even mine. So, Meh.

Treasury Department officials on Wednesday urged Congress to move quickly to increase the federal borrowing limit this summer, warning that the federal government could run out of cash much sooner than in previous debt-limit episodes.

Joey, crack debt, and the Left don’t care….

Or, channeling another, Biden is saying he’ll gladly owe us Tuesday for a borrowing today.

No.

The Federal government doesn’t need to have its debt ceiling raised. It needs its flood of spending vastly reduced.

Dangerous Naivete

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken has it. During a 60 Minutes interview, the man actually said that our nation does not have the luxury of not dealing with China.

That’s a blatantly raised straw man. No one is arguing that we should have no dealings with the People’s Republic of China. The debates are centered on how we should deal with it. Leave aside the fact that a total boycott of trade with the PRC is dealing with it, rather than not dealing with it, a means that no one is touting.

Instead, the debates involve moving our supply chain away from the threat the PRC poses, as illustrated by that nation’s attempt to cut off supplies of rare earth metals to other nations. They involve jawboning businesses to stop doing business with PRC suppliers operating with Uyghur slave labor. They involve how to pressure the PRC to desist from its Uyghur genocide in progress. They involve how to respond to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea and the islands within it that are owned by other nations (even if ownership is often disputed among those other nations.

Blinken said this, too, in that interview.

I want to be very clear about something. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.

This, especially, is an example of Blinken’s naivete. Our purpose most assuredly must include containing the PRC, holding it back. At least until it’s ready to stop being our enemy, to stop its genocide, to stop its slavery, to leave the South China Sea and respect the ownership of sovereign nations’ territory.

In fine, until the PRC is ready to join the community of civilized nations.

The full interview can be seen here.

Apologizing to Bigots

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A game show contestant won his contest last week. It was his third win in a row on that game show, and he bragged on it a little bit by flashing three fingers against his chest with his thumb and index finger forming a circle.

The Left has their collective panties twisted tightly. Flashing three fingers, they scream, isn’t a brag about winning three times. It isn’t even the standard “OK” sign that folks everywhere have used since forever.

No, it’s a White Supremacist sign. At least in their fetid, closed minds.

Worse, the winner wasn’t sufficiently contrite in response to the hysterical Left’s initial outcry.

“Most problematic to us as a contestant community,” they wrote, “is the fact that Kelly has not publicly apologized for the ramifications of the gesture he made.”

No, most problematic for the “contestant community” is the rank racist bigotry infesting that so-called community as they try so zealously to substitute their Newspeak dictionary for the standard dictionaries of honest Americans.

The response to the contestant’s abject apology, too, demonstrates that we cannot ever apologize to bigots; that only rewards them and eggs them on.

Apologizing to such as these actually is worse than useless—we can only counteract their bigoted assaults more forcefully than the attack.

The WSJ‘s final sentence in that editorial is spot on.

He has earned every penny, not least for giving a whole new meaning to Double Jeopardy.

Fair Share and Government’s Revenue

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Cecilia Rouse had some very instructive things to say on Fox News Sunday last weekend.

One was this:

The idea is to make sure that corporations are paying their fair share, to button up some of the loopholes, which have meant more corporations were actually putting more money offshore—off of US soil—and having a global minimum tax so that we’re working with the rest of our trading partners, so that we’re working with the rest of the world so that corporations are paying their fair share worldwide[.]

Couple things on this. One is that business of “paying their fair share.” Once again, a Progressive-Democrat declines to say what that “fair share” is, leaving us to conclude that “fair share” to Party is “more” until Government is getting all of it.

Sadly, too, Fox News Sunday‘s host Chris Wallace chose not to ask her what she considered to be that fair share, choosing instead to let that slide.

Another instructive remark from the FNS segment was this one by Rouse.

Yes, internationally we don’t want to be disadvantaged, so he’s also working with other countries so that we have a minimum tax internationally so there’s not a race to the bottom.

This is another example of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians pushing us to be more like the European Union. Every nation must charge high taxes with no economic competition among the nations to attract real innovation, real business, real economic activity which can only redound to the citizens of each nation.

Rouse, like the administrative state running the EU from Brussels, insists that a tax rate race to the bottom, a race to leave ever more money in the hands of the folks working to earn that money, is somehow a bad thing.

And that flows from a third instructive Rouse statement.

What we’ve seen over the past several decades is that the wealthiest Americans, the big corporations are getting wealthier, and they’re contributing less in terms of federal revenue[.]

“[I]n terms of federal revenue.” Because it’s not Americans’ money, it’s not (big) corporations’ money, it’s Government’s money.  Never mind that Party (nor Republicans nor Conservatives) have for far too long, justified Government’s claimed need for the money.