Tag Archives: political parties

This Move Suits Me

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Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler and his City Council are upset with Texas and our heartbeat law.

Portland City Council is to consider an emergency resolution this week to ban future travel, goods and services from the state of Texas in protest of the state’s new abortion law.
In statement released Friday, Mayor Ted Wheeler said City Council will hold a vote on the resolution on Wednesday, Sept 8, with the intent to ban Portland’s “future procurement of goods and services from, and City employee business travel to, the state of Texas.”

That works for me. Wheeler, acting as both Mayor and Police Commissioner, has actively condoned the rioting, looting, and arson that’s been going on in his city for more than a year, and he’s actively prevented his police force from protecting Federal property. He’s even, just recently, allowed a riotous clash between antifa and a far right group to continue to the point of gunfire by requiring his police to not interfere.

Portland’s City Council is working assiduously to defund the police altogether.

With the exception of those police themselves and the city’s other emergency responders, the city’s employees have shown themselves unfit for decent company. They’ll not be missed here.

What Biden’s Afghan Job Well Done Looks Like

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Ambassador Kelley Eckels Currie, former US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues:

Currie’s group organized buses to take roughly 700 Afghans, women and their families, to the [Kabul] airport, maintaining communications with the State Department, vetting the evacuees in advance and sharing passenger lists for the buses.
“The State Department was aware of the groups we were trying to assist,” Currie said. “I was told that this information had been raised at the highest levels; we had very senior people reaching out to State leadership.”
That included at least one message sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, she said. And she personally wrote a note to Undersecretary of State for Management Ambassador John Bass.
Authorities told the group to wait in a staging facility for 24 hours before the State Department reversed course and said it couldn’t help fly them out.

Those women remain stranded, abandoned by President Joe Biden’s team.

And this:

Taliban supporters in Afghanistan holding a mock funeral while hoisting coffins draped with flags from the US and other NATO countries.

None of this counts the hundreds (thousands?) of Americans Biden also has stranded—abandoned—in Afghanistan.

These represent the victory of which Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, JCS Chief General Mark Milley are so proud of accomplishing.

Debt Ceilings and Spend-Thriftiness

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One hundred and three House Republicans have signed a letter committing themselves to never vote for a debt ceiling increase under any circumstances. Forty-six Senate Republicans have signed a substantially similar letter.  (Aside: the nine Republican Representatives and four Republican Senators should be asked why they’re not signing on.) The signatories

will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, whether that increase comes through a stand-alone bill, a continuing resolution, or any other vehicle.

Of course, Congressional Progressive-Democrats are in a snit over that. Their beef centers, amorally, on “You guys are spendthrifts, too!”

They say most of the spending that will cause a breach of the debt limit later this year was passed on a bipartisan basis before President Biden assumed office.
They also note that Republicans significantly increased the deficit when they were in power during the first two years of former President Donald Trump’s term….

True enough. Both parties are guilty of spending American taxpayers’ money like it’s all Modern Monetary Theory’s bottomless bank of monopoly dollars. That, however, is no excuse for continuing the fiscal—and national economic security—folly.

Progressive-Democrats are in control now, with a majority in the House and control of both the Senate and the White House.

Progressive-Democrats have, today and in the coming months, the political capacity to show that they’re not just a bunch of woke virtue signalers and to live the virtue they claim. Today and in the coming months, the Progressive-Democrats can adjust their spending ways to limit themselves to the existing debt ceiling.

Thought Police

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They’re metastasizing into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a guide to “inclusive language” in order to promote “health equity” and “inclusive communication.”

For instance, their “Corrections & Detentions” section “suggests”

replacing terms such as “Inmate,” “Prisoner,” “Convict/ex-convict,” and “Criminal” with terms such as “People/persons,” “Persons in pre-trial or with charge,” “Persons on parole or probation,” or “People in immigration detention facilities.”

The problem with euphemisms, though, is that they mean precisely the same as the word they’re intended to replace. Persons on parole or probation still are criminals. That’s the status of folks on parole or probation—they’re still criminals, felons, until they complete their sentences. People in immigration detention facilities remain illegal aliens—that’s why they’re being detained.

The substitutes may soften the language in a misguided attempt to disguise or obfuscate the facts, but that’s only a temporary condition, and the frankness of the underlying meaning ultimately (and quickly) comes through. That’s why there’s a constant search for euphemisms.

The problem with government agents—the men and women who populate government agencies—being the ones pushing for euphemisms is that their push becomes mandates, and government mandates are nothing more than restrictions on free speech, limits on one of our most basic individual liberties. When government agents presume to dictate how we must term concepts, they’re dictating how we must think about them.

Even the worthies in government know that. Which is maybe why they’re making their push.

Government Fiat

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This is what the Progressive-Democrats in charge of our Federal Government are plotting [sic] in the way of drug pricing under Medicare Part D (the drug provision of Medicare), per the Tax Foundation.

Under HR 3 [the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act], if drug manufacturers do not agree to participate in negotiations, or do not agree to the negotiated price, they would be subject to an escalating excise tax on the sale of the drug in question. The tax would kick in at 65 percent and would rise by 10 percentage points each 90 days the manufacturers are in “noncompliance,” reaching a maximum tax rate of 95%.

What “negotiation?” This is the price we’re negotiating for, says the Health and Human Services Secretary, the Government official that HR3 says will represent the Government.

Here’s our counteroffer, says the drug manufacturer.

No, no, that’s too high, says SecHHS, repeating his original offer. Then he says, Here’s your noncompliance tax.

This isn’t negotiation, yet that’s what will occur, with the Government holding all the cards. Targeted drug manufacturers and sellers would not even be allowed to opt out of Medicare under HR3.

The Tax Foundation is concerned about drug innovation, and rightly so.

I’m also concerned about the fate of free enterprise and of individual freedom.