Category Archives: politics

Credulous Editors

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a tizzy over the Senate Judiciary Committee having voted out to the Senate floor the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having done so after the Progressive-Democratic Party’s committee members staged another of their toddler temper tantrums and stormed out of the committee meeting because they couldn’t get their way. Especially, though. the editors are upset because the Republican majority on the committee chose to ignore a so-called whistleblower’s beef about Bove.

At a March 14 meeting, discussing the possibility that a judge could block those removals [illegal alien deportations], “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” That’s according to a “whistleblower” letter by a former government lawyer.

And

The Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority dismissed this evidence as “completely devoid of context.” That sounds like an argument by plausible deniability. The whistleblower made specific claims, and isn’t his account context?

That also sounds like an argument for facts and specifics rather than anonymous claims. It’s telling that the editors chose one interpretation while completely ignoring another, much less identifying that other and explaining their logic in choosing the one interpretation over the other. And, no, the person’s account isn’t context; it is itself shorn of context: for instance, to whom was his letter written, what are the relationships between the letter writer and the letter’s recipient with Bove?

And this: the editors never even identify the whistleblower, whose name as the protected person that all whistleblowers are, should be a matter of public record. There’s also a reason that the editors put their characterization of whistleblower inside those euphemism quotes. Maybe that’s because the person isn’t actually a whistleblower, but a leaker with an axe to grind. What proof—what evidence, even—do the editors have that the person exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues before he chose to leak? Too, if the whistleblower isn’t actually one, but a leaker, why do the editors not worry about that leak context?

The Biggest Losers

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Progressive-Democratic Party New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a real threat to businesses domiciled in the city.

One of Mamdani’s most controversial proposals is a plan to launch government-run grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods.

Especially this, from 2021 when he was a city councilman:

…there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…the end goal of seizing the means of production….

Businesses would leave “in droves” if Mamdani gets elected, according to some. That’s the problem, though. Only those with mobile businesses—enterprises that can produce or sell their products anywhere, although factories of any size would be deucedly expensive to move. Businesses that can’t just pick up and go, though—the mom and pops, chain franchises that require hands-on direct customer-facing operations can’t. These include restaurants, fast food stores, gasoline stations, grocery stores, bodegas, food trucks, skating rinks, the list is endless: these businesses are trapped. And within a short time—one mayoral cycle, likely—they’ll be the ones left to pick up the city-imposed costs of operating in NYC.

And those small operations will be forced to compete against city government-run grocery stores, restaurants, gasoline stations, and on and on, businesses that have no worries about costs—especially with the city picking up, or waiving, the costs of rent and property taxes—because they’ll have the bottomless pocketbooks of the city’s coffers.

Yes, yes, Mamdani is only talking about government-run grocery stores. Who truly believes he’ll stop there? He’s already offering additions [from the first link]:

…eliminating subway fares, free municipal housing and childcare….

There’s Moderate…

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…and there’s moderate. Consider, for instance, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger. Her voting record, while she was a Congresswoman representing the 7th District of Virginia in the US House of Representatives, is comparable to those of, for instance, Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY). News writers call Spanberger a moderate in her run for governor. This characterization of Spanberger is typical of politicians near the center of Party.

That’s actually not far wrong, either, when context is included. Spanberger is a moderate within Party; she is near its center. However, that center is nowhere near the center of the American political spectrum as a whole. Party’s center is well to the Left in the context of our national political spectrum. That’s how far left Party has moved since the Obama reign, and it’s been moving ever farther left since the beginning of the Biden reign. How far left, and still on the move, is demonstrated by the power and influence of the socialist, in nominally Independent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—and by Party’s overwhelming nomination of the openly socialist Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor.

The Spanbergers of Party are to the right of Party’s Left wing, but they are still Progressives and so remain far Left overall.

A Tax False Premise

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A letter writer in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered an alternative to the provider tax so many States assess. The provider tax is a tax States levy on hospitals that, in the depths of the scam, the States use to get a larger allocation of Federal fund transfers into their Medicaid programs, which then reimburse those hospitals for their provider tax remittances to the State.

The letter writer suggests

If states collected taxes from other sources, channeled the revenue into their Medicaid programs and continued to provide the same services, they would be entitled to the same federal matching as they are today. Nothing would need to change.

The false premise from which this letter writer proceeds is this: the need for those tax dollars in the first place is not at all established. On the contrary: Medicaid is a State-run program and its payouts are entirely controlled by that State. As such, each State’s Medicaid program should be funded entirely and exclusively by the citizens of that State. There is no need for the Federal government to transfer the tax remittals of the citizens of any other State (much less all of them) to any State for its Medicaid program.

Indeed, were each State to retain those tax dollars rather than sending them to the Federal government, the citizens of each State would be better able to fund their State’s Medicaid program.

No, It Won’t

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This time, it’s an op-ed writer in The Wall Street Journal who is making misleading claims. In his piece regarding the likelihood of wealth flight from a Zohran Mamdani-run New York City, their subheadline reads

The state will lose wealthy taxpayers, and the federal government will have to cough up more aid.

The opinion-writer ties the weal of our nation to the weal of New York, and the article fails utterly on the false premise of a necessary Federal bailout.

No, the Federal government will not have to cough up more aid. New York’s political machinations, including its drumbeat attacks on successful Americans and on businesses domiciled there, would be coming to a head under a socialist Mamdani city administration, and that outcome is solely that New York State’s responsibility.

The good citizens of States running from Maine through New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, on to California, Alaska, and Hawaii have absolutely no obligation to bail out a fiscally and regulatorily irresponsible New York City or State. The Federal government has no business forcing the rest of the nation’s citizens to do so.

The other side of the matter: only if New York—city and State—are left to stew in their own fetid spending, taxing, and regulation messes will either have any chance of mending its ways. In that way, the weal of the nation is impacted by the weal of New York State: a healthy State, not dependent of Federal funding, would be an unalloyed good for our nation.