Tag Archives: culture

Will It Be The End?

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Major portions of the press are convinced that a Republican sweep in the coming mid-term elections would spell the end for our nation. A recent Fox News headline reads,

CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and more worry about bloodbath for the Democrats in midterms: “The end of our country”

To which I say, if by “our” they mean CNN‘s, MSNBC‘s, NBC‘s, et al.‘s version of the country, I certainly hope so.

Those…outlets…support in the most vociferous way the racism and sexism of identity politics and Big Government’s utter contempt for us average Americans. They do not share even their Progressive movement founder Theodore Roosevelt’s insistence on an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. They do not support a nation in which equal opportunity exists, where all of us—each of us—are equal under law and before God. They demand equality of outcome, which cancels (to coin a term) any ability each man to show [his] best.

They demand that only (Progressive-)Democrats must be elected.

The Barbarian on His Redeployment

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is redeploying some of his forces away from the vicinity of Kyiv. He’s also ordering his hordes to lay booby traps that would do Daesh proud.  Per Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (as cited by The Wall Street Journal):

[R]etreating Russian forces had placed mines in houses, laid trip wires and booby-trapped corpses.

And this:

The [Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv] city council said a confectionery factory in Bucha had been mined by the Russian military before it departed.

Never mind the lack of military importance of this sort of installation. Certainly, sugar can be used to make a variety of bombs, but to the extent that’s the case, the militarily appropriate act would have been simply to destroy the factory. This was done solely to inflict more civilian casualties.

And at a private residence in Velyka Dymerka, a village just northeast of Kyiv, a returning resident filmed the damage done by Russians:

In a kennel outside, his dog lay dead, apparently shot. “Why would you kill it?”

Because barbarism.

The Progressive-Democratic Party Fails Again

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editors are concerned about the Left’s and the Progressive-Democrats in Congress’ efforts to cancel in one form or another Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over some text messages his wife sent.

Democrats and their media allies quickly sped past Ginni to demand that Justice Thomas resign (Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY)), or be impeached (Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN)), or at least recuse himself from hearing cases related to elections (Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN), et al.).

The Editors are entirely justified in that concern.

However, I think the problem goes well beyond that.  This whole sorry affair is typical of the Left’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s intrinsic sexist bigotry, and their efforts to turn back the clock on the feminist movement (the real one of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, et al., not today’s movement of professional victimhood and identity politics).

Demanding Justice Thomas recuse/resign/be impeached over his wife’s remarks does nothing but reduce Mrs Thomas to that erstwhile status of a wife being merely an appendage of her husband and not a free agent in her own right.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.

Envy

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Success in the American Dream tax. That’s what he and his Progressive-Democratic Party cronies are about to propose and to try to inflict on us. A minimum tax of 20% on income, and on the increased value of non-income assets over the prior year—whether or not those assets were sold and actual income received from the sale.

Because success—making it especially big—in our nation without the “help” of Big Government is anathema to Progressive-Democrats. Such success goes against their mantra that us average Americans can’t be trusted with our own decisions; our own definitions of our needs, our wants, our charities (and how to support them); our own means of satisfying our responsibilities and living with our liberties.

No, our American Dream must be, and must be limited to, what Progressive-Democrats say it is for all of us, not what each of the 330 million of us individuals say it is for each of us individuals.

Oh, and this: Biden and his syndicate cronies don’t even have a use for the tax money, nor have they claimed a plausible one. They just want it. They’re jealous that others have more of it than they do.