Category Archives: politics

Amy Klobuchar the Progressive

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Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary candidate is proud to declare herself Progressive, for all that her mouth keeps saying words of centrism, highlighting her work bridging the political divide.

I think [voters] should see me as a progressive because I believe in progress and I have worked towards progress my whole life.

Here’s Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement.  I’ve cited him on other occasions; this should be a familiar quote.

[A]ny increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy….  [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

The necessity for increased centralization of government power that’s claimed by the Progressive-Democratic Party is illustrated by the attempted nationalization of our health care coverage industry that is Obamacare (which we weren’t allowed to know anything about until the bill was passed, recall).  It’s illustrated by the Progressive-Democratic Party’s incessant demand for ever higher taxes and ever higher spending.  It’s Illustrated by Progressive-Democrats’ crowing over having “successfully” driven Amazon out of Long Island City before it even arrived (a withdrawal with which I agreed, but not for Party reasons).  It’s illustrated by the Progressive-Democratic Party’s, and nearly all of its declared and not-yet-declared candidates for President’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Green New Deal, which seeks to nationalize our energy, auto, construction industries—virtually our entire economy—and get it done within 10 years.

Today’s Progressives’ contempt for Americans, echoing Croly’s, is illustrated by ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dismissal of tens of millions of us as bitter Bible-clingers and gun-toters living in flyover country.  Today’s Progressives’ contempt for Americans is illustrated by the Progressive-Democratic Party’s just prior Presidential candidate dismissing tens of millions of Americans as irredeemably deplorable racist, misogynistic homophobes.  Today’s Progressives’ contempt for Americans is illustrated by their dismissal of the need to secure our borders and the need to control who we let into our country.

Progressive, indeed.  There’s nothing moderate about Progressivism, and Klobuchar is proud—insistent—to be known as a Progressive.

A Serious Case

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Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann is suing The Washington Post for its despicable and wholly, deliberately dishonest assault on the boy in its reporting on a confrontation initiated by an American Indian provocateur who also has a history of misrepresenting his role in the Vietnam War, a confrontation that was triggered by a group of blacks claiming to be Jewish and who were yelling racial slurs at Sandmann and his fellow students as the students waited for their bus ride back home.

The suit accuses WaPo of

using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles…to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the president.

Any member of the NLMSM that delayed reporting of anything more than the fact of an encounter by a whole day in order to view the full video of the encounter would have known the facts and the truth.  WaPo made the carefully thought out editorial decision not to tarry that moment in order to gather actual facts on the matter.  Of course, the news outlet’s owners and editors could not know in real time that a dispositive video would be published, but those worthies did know, absolutely, that more facts would emerge, more facts could be brought to light by competent investigation.  The outlet chose not to bother.  It chose, instead, to attack children—leave aside its bias against a Republican President—for the sake of sensationalism, for clickbait, for readership.

My advice to Sandmann and the lawyers? Do not settle.  Get the court ruling.  Do not settle any appeals.  The suit is for harm and for $250 million.  Those $250 million needn’t only be for immediate damages, either; they can include significant punitive damages.

Burn the WaPo to the ground.  Its despicable assault on a child wants a serious answer, not a slap on the wrist. WaPo‘s abuse of a child wants an answer that not only gets the outlet’s attention (which to achieve that attention must consider the outlet’s deep pockets, via its owner), but one that also serves as a serious warning to the outlet’s peers in the NLMSM on the relative priorities between telling the cold facts and objective truth on the one hand and sensationalizing smears for the sake of clickbait on the other.

Those…1%-ers

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Those evil 1%-ers.  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) hates them.  Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) hates them.  Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) hates them.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) hates them, even though she’s one of them.  The list goes on and on and on of Progressive-Democrats and Modern Liberals in general who hate them.

Charlie Munger, Vice MFWIC of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and 1%-er, thinks otherwise.

I think it’s really stupid for a state to drive the rich people out[.]
…
It’s been serious. Driving the rich people out is pretty dumb if you’re a state or a city.

And

They’re old. They keep your hospitals busy. They don’t burden your schools, the police department, your prisons. They give a lot. Who wouldn’t want rich people?

Indeed.

Notice who the envious haters are, too.  The rest of us—politically in the center, right of center, and right, and ideologically middle of the road or conservative—might be jealous of those wealthy ones, but far from hating them, we want to be like them, we want the same success, prosperity, and wealth.  And we’re willing to work for it, rather than claiming “our fair share” of their money or demanding their trappings of success for ourselves.

Border Crises

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There are two, and both of them are real.  One is the caravans, organized by three Central American nations’ activists explicitly to overwhelm our southern border and border enforcers with illegal alien wannabes and faux asylum seekers (false because they’ve already been offered asylum—and job opportunities, to boot—by Mexico).  Secreted among these seemingly innocuous ones (aside from their deliberate numbers) are drug smugglers, firearms smugglers, human traffickers, and outright thugs.

The other crisis, wholly artificially done, is the Progressive-Democrats’ efforts to block the installation of security measures to protect our borders and so our interior and our citizens.  That obstructionist and open-border policy is now exemplified by their lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration and associated reallocation of Federal funds to build walls in key sectors of that border.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent Trump from shifting billions of dollars from military construction to the border without explicit congressional approval. The suit also asks a court to declare Trump’s actions illegal, arguing that Trump showed a “flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution” by violating the Constitution’s Presentment and Appropriations Clauses, which govern federal spending.

Never mind that the Courts have no say in what constitutes a national emergency; that’s strictly an Executive Branch decision.  Never mind that the funds being shifted have already been appropriated and allocated to the relevant Department and Agency heads.  Never mind that the funds being reallocated were never earmarked by Congress within those facilities to specific purposes, as the vast majority of appropriated funds are—these few funds explicitly were left to those Department and Agency heads’ discretion regarding the things on which they would be spent.

And never mind, either, that the targets for the spending are directly related to the Department/Agency functions: military construction funds are going to be spent on construction.  Drug interdiction funds are going to be spent on drug interdiction—that being one of the purposes of the walls.  Funds for ATF not specifically allocated are going to be spent on interdicting trafficked firearms—that being another purpose of the walls.  Never mind that DHS funds not otherwise specifically allocated are going to be spent on interdicting human traffickers and violent criminals—that being another purpose of the walls.

And never mind that while there is considerable money appropriated and allocated for border and border crossing point detection surveillance technology, increased border personnel, increased numbers of immigration judges assigned to the border cases, and increased asylum seeker housing, these are useless without walls, just as walls are useless without those others.

This second border crisis is a wholly artificial crisis manufactured solely for the personal political gain of Progressive-Democrats and for the benefit of Party.

Full stop.

Progressive-Democrats and Integrity

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In an interview on Bill Maher’s show, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel had this to say about promises.  The comment was in the context of Emanuel and Maher nattering on about Trump, but it’s plainly made as a universal principle.

Emanuel…believes Trump is using a national emergency declaration, not to enhance border security, but to deliver on his signature campaign promise.
“You have a faux constitutional crisis to basically cover a real campaign crisis,” he said, “This is all about the campaign. Some pledge he made.”

Some pledge he made.  Because promises are made only to sway voters; they’re not actually meant to be kept.

That’s one view of integrity.