Tag Archives: culture

Who Do They Hate More?

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Republicans offered a resolution that would acknowledge the extraordinary sacrifice that law enforcement personnel make in their efforts to keep the rest of us safe while decrying the loud Leftist movement to defund the law enforcement departments within which those police officers operate.

173 Progressive-Democrats in the House voted “Nay.” Those politicians rationalized their No votes with their objections to

language in the resolution that criticized left-wing activists for supporting the defund the police movement and sanctuary city policies for putting officers’ safety at risk[.]

The question arises, then, regarding who Progressive-Democrats hate most: Republicans, who were the primary movers of this simple resolution, or the police the resolution honored.

One Way to Reduce Welfare Fraud

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The lede laid out the breadth of the problem.

The Trump administration’s work to pare back waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government has reportedly exposed a vast network of taxpayer-fleecing scams, abuses of immigration, and of the citizenship process across all corners of the United States.

It’s necessary, certainly, to act to correct these abuses and to bring the abusers and fraudsters to justice—including State officials who ignored the problems in their States or were actively complicit in them.

It’s necessary, though, to act proactively against these frauds on the American people. One means of going on offense is simple and straightforward, if politically difficult (though only difficult in the minds of timid politicians). That is to set about reducing the opportunities for fraud. Eliminate some welfare programs that are redundant or overlapping and to greatly reduce the scope, eligibility for, and funding of the remaining welfare programs.

With less money to steal, there’ll be less opportunity to steal it, and more usefully, those attempts will be more readily detected and the fraud wannabes caught and jailed.

Symptomatic

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Alex Shepherd, writing in the 7 May edition of the Left-wing The New Republic, exposed the core position of the Progressive-Democratic Party going into this fall’s mid-term elections and the continuing run toward the 2028 Presidential election.

…the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.

That’s it. That’s the sum of what Party has on offer for the coming election cycles. No substantive policies to tout and to contrast with Republican or Trumpian policies. Nothing to say about how their positions are better than Republicans’ or Trump’s for our nation.

Just anti-Trump, no to all things Trumpian or Republican, Never Trump.

A party with no substance, only anti-ism and hate, is a party that cannot be trusted with the reins of power.

Excuses

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Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.

One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:

Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?

Then there’s the other letter-writer.

When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.

This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.

The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.

For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.

The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.

Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.