My Black Life Matters

Your black lives don’t matter. Neither do your brown lives. Or your white lives. Or your oriental lives. Go suck an egg.

That’s the position of Congresswoman Cori Bush (D, MO).

I’m going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life[.]

And

And defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.

Bush bleats that she’s had a few death threats. She doesn’t care that folks in the inner city and in other crime-ridden neighborhoods—black, brown, white, oriental folks—exist with the daily threat of actual death from gang fight shootings, drive-by shootings, shootings in the bodega during a robbery, shootings from drug deals gone bad, bullets sprayed around from any of those gunfights.

No, those folks’ lives aren’t worth spit to Bush. She demands to defund the police forces that would, if backed by politicians in local governments, instead of being excoriated, disarmed, defenestrated by Bush and her ilk, protect those blacks, browns, whites, and orientals who without police actually will be killed, not just get the occasional angry emailed threat.

No. “Suck it up,” Bush says in her cynically manufactured righteous anger.

Tax Gaps

And tax gaps.

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX) and Senator Mike Crapo (R, ID) are properly concerned about the gap between taxes collected by the IRS and taxes actually owed by Americans and our businesses.

Their concerns are entirely valid, but they’re secondary.

When asked where Brady would prioritize reforms within the IRS, he told FOX Business he would like to see the agency do better with the resources it has, including smarter auditing and better information gathering to target and win cases against taxpayers.
Secondly, he said he would like to see funds put toward customer service initiatives.

That’s all to the very important good. However, none of that will occur until a far more important reform, a far wider tax gap, is corrected: the replacement of all IRS bureaucrats, from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on down into middle management. Those bureaucrats think they’re a government unto themselves and not at all responsible to Congress or even the Executive Branch.

Look no further than Rettig’s own refusal to answer the questions Crapo has asked—

In a letter sent to Rettig in May, Crapo asked for clarification as to where the figure came from before Congress began making policy decisions based on it.
His office told FOX Business at the end of last month that it had still not gotten a satisfactory response….

—and to the behavior of Lois Lerner and the lack of action regarding her miscreancies.

That’s the tax gap that cries out for closing.

“Voting System ‘Under Assault'”

So says President Joe Biden (D). He also says protecting it was the “single most important thing to do.”

The single most important thing that we have to do is we have to protect the voting system, protect the sacred right to vote. It’s under assault in ways that I haven’t seen in my entire career.

He’s right.

That assault, however, comes directly from his own Party’s attempt to nationalize how elections are run in each of the several States—in deliberate, cynical contravention of what our Constitution says–and from Progressive-Democrats’ lies about what’s actually in the election reform laws.

Here’s Article I, Section 4, on the matter of who sets the rules for elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

The Congress cannot write its own laws regarding how States shall run elections in their jurisdictions. Congress can only modify State laws, and then only to ensure compliance with the rest of our Constitution, vis., our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Further, in order to modify a State law, that State law must exist. If Congress writes the Federal law, there will be no State law extant to be modified.

The other part of Biden’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s assault on our voting system rests on the fundamental dishonesty of their claims about what the States are doing.

Georgia, for instance, lengthened the weekend hours of early voting and added a Sunday to that early voting period. This is somehow suppressive of the vote, the Progressive-Democrats claim, and they want the expanded hours rescinded.

Georgia also legalized, standardized, and ensured the security of ballot drop boxes—drop boxes which did not exist prior to the Wuhan Virus-impacted 2020 election and whose creation for that election were illegal, having been created by the Georgia Secretary of State and not Georgia’s legislature. This legalizing and regularizing also, Progressive-Democrats dishonestly claim, are supposed to suppress voting, and they must be blocked.

Arizona’s proposed election reform laws would, among other things, prohibit mass mailing of absentee ballots, requiring instead each voter to explicitly request one, a move which would reduce the opportunity of fraud and enhance the safety of actually cast ballots. No, the Progressive-Democrats say; they want those fraud opportunities.

Progressive-Democrat lies about Texas’ moves are similarly broad. The proposed bills expand early voting hours, standardize procedures across counties, require the objectivity of some sort of voter ID with absentee ballots rather than the by-guess-and-by-golly of signature matching, and bar ballot harvesting. These improvements to vote integrity and ballot access are unacceptable to the Progressive-Democrats; they want here, too, their opportunity for fraud preserved.

And on top of all this, Texas’ House Progressive-Democrats, in the name of supporting the vote, have absconded from the legislature and departed the State explicitly to suppress voting on those bill proposals.

All of these expansions of voter access and of vote integrity are just Jim Crow on steroids, Biden says. Go figure.

Not a Bad Gig

Who needs work when Uncle Sugar will take care of you?

Under emergency response legislation, the federal government expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits, extended the number of weeks, and gave bonuses to state unemployment benefits. The expansion will sunset in September, but congressional Democrats have pressed President Biden for an extension.

The current state of affairs according to a report by Alli Fick, a Senior Research Fellow with the Foundation for Government Accountability, is this:

An individual can receive nearly $3,700 a month—or more than $44,000 a year—by staying at home. On top of tax credits, food stamps, and state unemployment benefits, an individual can receive an additional $1,300 per month with the $300 weekly unemployment bonus.

It’s not a bad gig, and nearly anyone can get it. All courtesy of virtue-signaling politicians of both parties.

It can get worse, too. Progressive-Democrats are pushing the trap of free income—universal basic income.