Tag Archives: political parties

Obamacare Subsidies and Appropriations Bills

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen and Senators are attempting to extort Republicans into surrendering on extending/restoring Progressive-Democrat-passed (in 2021) Obamacare expanded subsidies.

Unfortunately, they’ll likely succeed, as too many Republicans in each house are too timid to stand their ground.

Never mind that if those Republicans would crawl out from under their desks, they easily could make the case that any government shutdown would be (and after the realization, was) the sole doing of those Progressive-Democrats. It’s those Party members, after all, who threatened to close our government if they weren’t meekly obeyed and who in the realization did close our government.

These Republicans think they face regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ announcement is a chimera, too. The Federal government never really shuts down. With current tax law, funds come flowing in to Federal coffers are plenty for the Federal government to keep paying, on schedule, almost all of existing Federal outlays. The losses from any supposed shutdown would be primarily via Federal contracts with businesses that provide services to the Feds, but most of these businesses would be made whole under the terms of those same contracts.

The larger, underlying problem this extortion exposes, though, is the Republicans’ failure, in their aggregate, to pass all of the dozen separate appropriations bills they’re nominally required to pass every year. These appropriations bills are the actual spending bills that commit actual dollars that the Federal government has committed through its various allocation bills, which is where the government says what it wants to fund. Appropriations are those funds.

Had the Republicans in Congress actually passed those dozen bills on schedule, or at least by the end of the current fiscal year (which has another week left, so theoretically they still could), as they promised at the start of the year and of which they’ve only passed three or four, there would be no risk of a shutdown, and the Progressive-Democrats would have no extortion bricks to throw threw government windows.

Will the Republicans learn this lesson for the second year of this Congressional session? They never have in the past. I’m not holding my breath for the future.

“socialize the agricultural system”

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That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.

Silly Question

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Progressive-Democratic Party Zohran Mamdani now claims he will “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada. The editors at the WSJ wonder

if he really understood [the term and the phrase], wouldn’t he go further and outright condemn such language?

It’s a silly question. Mamdani’s claim is empty rhetoric, intended solely to garner votes, with nothing whatsoever to do with any sincere conversion of understanding.

Mamdani fully understands the phrase and the term; that’s why encouraged it in the first place, and that’s why he continues, consciously and deliberately, to refuse to condemn it and to consciously and deliberately to weasel-word his way around questions of why he will not condemn.

This is who Party chose for their mayoral candidate, and this is who New York City residents are on the cusp of electing as their mayor.

The city is about to get an up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have a socialist who also is an anti-Semitic bigot running their show. The rest of our nation is about to get an object lesson in the outcomes of broad socialism and rank bigotry at the top of a city government.

Hopefully, it awaken the rest of our nation and take us back toward the virtuous people that one of our Founders readily acknowledged is a necessary prerequisite for a republic and for a population to govern itself.

I support and endorse Mamdani’s election for precisely that lesson.

Conflagration of Norms

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As President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Branch nominations languish in the Senate (300 of them), Republicans there are considering changing the rules to speed the nomination confirmation/rejection process. As The Wall Street Journal puts it in its lede,

…Democrats will call it President Trump’s latest conflagration of norms.

This would be, of course, typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ hypocrisy. Senate norms have already been burned to ashes in the conflagration of Party’s unprecedented obstruction of nearly all things President (read Trump) and nearly all things Republican. But especially all things (not just nearly all) regarding the President’s nominations and Party’s knee-jerk, universal attempts to block and its successes in slowest-walking the confirmation process. Progressive-Democrats are actively stalling even minor nominees who won bipartisan support in committee, just in petty protest of Trump policy (Party politicians claim it’s over his firing of Party-favored Executive Branch appointees, but their obstruction is much broader than that).

Changing the rules in the way Republicans are proposing—limited time to debate each nomination, allowing nominations to be considered in batches, with each batch subject to that same limited debate time—are sorely needed, and the change would benefit all Presidents, not just Trump.

The folks a President nominates and wants confirmed are intended to be members of the President’s team. Party politicians, though, are with their actions demanding confirmees be members of Party’s team, regardless of which party is in power from administration to administration.

Rights from Men, Not from God

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That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker