More Disingenuosity of the Left

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Buried in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill that they’re so desperate to hurry up and get passed before anyone can peruse it is this payoff to unions:

The bill the House passed would allow union members to deduct up to $250 of dues from their tax bills. The deduction is “above the line,” meaning filers can exclude the cost of dues from their gross income. In other words, union dues would get the same treatment now reserved for things like insurance premiums and retirement contributions.

The Progressive-Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, claims it’s no payoff at all; it’s because

Unions are the backbone of the middle class. This legislation would put money back in the pockets of working families.

Never mind that union membership in the entire private sector is only a bit over 6%, not close to any sort of middle class backbone.

What the Progressive-Democrat carefully ignores, too, is that absent the vast increase in taxes included in the reconciliation bill, there’d be no need to put money back in the pockets of working families because that money wouldn’t be leaving those pockets in the first place.

The WSJ has the right of it:

The true goal of the tax break is to fill union coffers by making dues less of a deterrent to joining. The incentive would be particularly strong in 23 states without right-to-work laws, where workers pay partial union fees whether or not they’re members.

(Keep in mind, too, that the Progressive-Democrats also are pushing legislation that would eliminate right-to-work laws in those 23 States and nation-wide.)

Bread and circuses. Vote buying.

Wuhan Virus Deaths and Wuhan Virus Politics

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The Wuhan Virus mortality rate for those of us who are basically healthy is, and has been all along, once we started getting enough data to make such assessments, a pretty constant and small fraction of 1%—out of 1,000 cases, fewer than 5 of us are likely to die.  Fewer yet, if we consider all infections, but the only hard data we have are reported cases, since many with infections either are asymptomatic, and so go unreported, or are sufficiently mild that the individual self-medicates, and so go unreported.

That’s the context against which the politically motivated hype only the total deaths from the virus—some hundreds of thousands. The emotion-laden focus on those deaths ignores the far vaster numbers who’ve gotten sick and recovered: just under 800 thousand vs 38.8 million recovered according to worldometer, as of 25 November. That 2% mortality rate, though, includes all deaths reported from the virus—including the old and those with comorbidities, for whom the mortality rates are far higher than for the general population.

All of which is a long-winded lead-in to this.

There were 220 thousand American deaths attributed to the Wuhan Virus during the fall Presidential campaign last year, and candidate Joe Biden said

Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.

As of the same period this year, in the reign of President Joe Biden (D), 350 thousand Americans have died from the Wuhan Virus.

This comes despite the fact that for most of 2020, we had no vaccines and no proven palliatives against the virus until just about this time frame in 2020, and Biden has had those vaccines and an increasing number of effective—at least to some degree—palliatives, and our doctors and nurses have far more experience in dealing with the virus, for his entire reign.

Biden has declared himself unfit to be President. Biden again:

If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive[.]

Indeed.

Rules Don’t Matter

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The Progressive-Democrats want to toss inconvenient Senate rules so they can have anything they demand. And they’ve become very open about that.

A group of House Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) penned a letter urging the Senate’s Democratic leadership to ignore the Senate Parliamentarian ruling that a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill.

And from the letter,

We do understand that the Senate Parliamentarian has issued a memorandum dismissing—despite evidence to the contrary—the budgetary impact of providing a pathway to citizenship. But the role of the Parliamentarian is an advisory one, and the Parliamentarian’s opinion is not binding.

Never mind the carefully unsubstantiated claim of budgetary impact. Consider the demand that the Parliamentarian’s ruling be blithely ignored. It is an advisory ruling, but under Senate reconciliation ruling it is binding, and the Senate is bound by it.

Sure, the ruling can be overridden, but that capability is irrelevant, as the Progressive-Democrats know full well. Statutes are binding, also, as are Federal agency regulations, and statutes and regulations also can be overridden: by subsequent statute or regulation, by the issuing agency rescinding its regulation, by the courts overruling or striking altogether the statute or regulation.

But overrule it the damned thing, Progressive-Democrats demand; it’s inconvenient to their purpose.

Nor will such disregard be limited to immigration. They’ll move to ignore any Senate rule, any regulation, any statute that gets in their way.

The Progressive-Democrats, in their drive to “fundamentally transform our nation,” now are saying out loud that a Critical Item in their desired transformation is that we should no longer be a nation ruled by law, but a nation ruled by men and women—their men and women in particular.

Remember this next fall, and keep it firmly in mind for 2024.

The Control of the People’s Republic of China

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The nation appears to be close to running the United Nations as its own PR firm. Emma Reilly was an Irish Human Rights Officer with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Then she gave an interview to Le Monde [Google Translate is friendly enough] in which she described the UNHCR as having giving up the names of Chinese dissidents who were to travel to Geneva to testify before the UNHCR to the People’s Republic of China, just because the PRC demanded the information.

Indeed,

Since the beginning of September, this 42-year-old Irishwoman…has no longer had access to her professional emails. This is the price to pay for denouncing the privileges that the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has granted to China under pressure.

That objection was raised first with High Commissioner for Human Rights, who chose not to respond, then with a number of governments, including ours, also with nary a meaningful response. Only then did she go to the press.

She was fired from the UN the day after her Le Monde interview, with no objection from any of the UNHCR members or from the UN membership at large. Not even the Biden-Harris administration directly or via the administration’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, dared issue a peep of objection. Not even when she raised the problems with the Biden-Harris administration’s UN missions in New York and in Geneva.

No-Border Policy

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Here are some of the illegal aliens that Co-Presidents Biden-Harris (D) and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (D) are allowing into our nation under their open- no-border policy:

  • 302 illegal alien sex offenders arrested as part of Operation SOAR (Sex Offender Arrest and Removal) but not deported
  • 24-year-old Honduran illegal alien who stabbed to death the father of a family in Florida that he was staying with after entering the country by claiming he was a 17-year-old
  • Ernesto Lopez Morales, an illegal alien from Guatemala, who was arrested after a hit-and-run that killed a 5-year-old girl
  • 13 people, including 10 Mexican citizens, who were killed in a highway crash when 25 were crammed into a Ford Expedition and it was struck by a tractor-trailer
  • Another SUV with 19 people in it that entered the US through the same hole in the border fence and caught fire. Everyone escaped, and they were arrested by Border Patrol—but not deported

It’s only going to get worse, too, as Border Czar Harris—the other half of that Presidency—continues to visit our nonborder (but she’s been to Europe, now) and to do nothing else regarding the matter or immigration generally, Biden continues to be oblivious (which is a redundancy where it concerns our nonborder), and Mayorkas continues to lie about our nonborder being somehow closed.