Tag Archives: political parties

Don’t Ask

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Just act. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R, OH) and House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R, KY) want Michael Lewitt, a Biden family business associate, to come before their committees and testify regarding his involvement with James Biden and Americore Health.

It’s time wasting, though, to ask pretty please for interviews—transcribed, which the present pretty please is not for, or not—from Biden-associated persons. Just subpoena them, with a certain, nearby date for appearance. The committee chairmen are just idly burning daylight with these time-wasters.

A Biden Administration Oxymoron

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OK, another Biden administration oxymoron. This one is the latest to deprecate our national security and to not favorably impress our friends and allies. William Luti (Captain, USN Ret, and Hudson Institute Adjunct Fellow), got right to it in the lede of his Christmas Wall Street Journal op-ed, quoting, as he did there, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh:

We’re not in an armed conflict with the Houthis…part of why we are in the region is to bolster our deterrence.

Because doing nothing in response to several multiples of overt attacks on US facilities, both military and civilian, deters the hell out of Iran and its terrorist satraps. It sure does: it deters the hell out of Iranian and terrorist restraint, and it declares open season on American facilities and on international shipping in international waters.

Contrary to the fetid imaginings of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his syndicate cronies SecDef Lloyd Austin and SecState Antony Blinken, actual deterrence includes, as Critical Items, actually shooting and killing those who attack us and our friends and allies.

Proper deterrence in the present case, real deterrence, would begin (not end) with destroying the two ports the Houthi terrorists have on the Red Sea and destroying the terrorists’ launch facilities inland. Proper deterrence would continue with the destruction of Iran’s ports on the Arabian Gulf, Hormuz Strait, and Gulf of Oman, which would limit the terrorist state’s ability to resupply its satrap in Yemen.

Proper deterrence would extend to destroying the attackers’ facilities in Syria and Iraq, limiting Iran’s satraps there. It would extend further to destroying Iran’s Ho Chi Minh Trail analog that runs from northwestern Iran through northern Iraq into Syria.

Deterrence does not consist of shooting down drones and rockets as the sum total. That just tells the terrorists that they’re down at the neighborhood gun range, practicing their shooting.

Luti described President Ronald Reagan’s response to an earlier Iranian attack, concluding his description with this:

As other Enterprise air-wing aircraft began their bombing runs, Reagan called off the attack after Joint Chiefs Chairman William Crowe said, “We’ve shed enough blood for one day.”

That was 35 years ago. Our enemies have gotten even worse. We won’t have done enough enemy blood shedding until those terrorist facilities are erased and Iran’s ability to resupply its satraps eliminated.

It’s time the Biden syndicate recognized the nature and the depth and breadth of the war that our enemies are inflicting on us and responded accordingly.

Political Donations Received and Returned

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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made a number of political donations to Republican and Progressive-Democrat candidates in the 2022 election cycle. FTX has gone into bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried has related legal problems.

Just the News cited OpenSecrets.org for the following data:

In the House:

65 Democrats received average contributions of $3,758 from FTX
73 House Republicans received average contributions of $3,300

In the Senate side:

24 Democrats received an average of $5,796
20 Republicans received $6,695

Back to the House:

8 Democrats returned their contributions
12 Republicans returned their contributions

The Senate:

2 Democrats returned their contributions
4 Republicans returned their contributions

Here are the percentage figures, since the raw numbers without context could be misleading. In the House:

8 of 65 Democrats returned—12%
12 of 73 Republicans returned—16%

In the Senate:

2 of 24 Democrats returned—17%
4 of 20 Republicans returned—20%

It really is all about the Benjamins. For Progressive-Democrats.

Go figure.

Punishing Success

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Los Angeles has decided that the successful are too successful, and they must be knocked down. To that end, the city’s government has decided to tax the sales proceeds of the wealthy’s homes at 4% on homes sold for $5-$10 million and at 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. This is on top of the real estate brokers’ ordinary 6% fee, and it’s paid by the buyer. Not that that will have any impact on the seller’s ability to sell at a fair price, or anything.

LA isn’t alone in this “mansion tax” move, either. Other jurisdictions, mostly at the State level (it won’t be long before California broadens LA’s move), are doing this, also. They’re all Progressive-Democrat-run, too, all but one of them exclusively so.

  • Connecticut: 2.25% on properties surpassing $2.5 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • District of Columbia: 1.45% on properties sold for $400,000 or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, City Council
  • Hawaii: Marginal rates ranging from 10% to 20% for estates valued over $5.49 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New Jersey: 1% on real estate transactions exceeding $1 million. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • New York: 1% to 3.9% on residential acquisitions of $1 million or more. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House
  • Vermont: 16% on properties valued over $5 million. Republican Governor, Progressive-Democrat Senate, House
  • Washington: Graduated rates starting at 1.28% for properties sold at a minimum of $500,000. Progressive-Democrat Governor, Senate, House

And, to repeat,

  • Los Angeles: 4% on homes sold for more than $5-$10 million and 5.5% on homes sold for more than $10 million. Progressive-Democrat Mayor, City Council

This is behavior of the green-eyed jealous politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party: seizing the produce of success and redistributing it for their own political gain. It’s also just one more incentive for the successful to leave these jurisdictions altogether.

Whine, Whine, Whine

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Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson has joined the Whiners’ Chorus. Now he’s accusing Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott of “attacking” the United States itself.

We have a governor—a governor—an elected official in the state of Texas, that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago where we have homelessness, we have mental health clinics that have been shut down and closed, you have people who are seeking employment.

Leave aside, as Johnson does, the fact that these illegal aliens are volunteers to travel—at Texas’ expense, mind you—to Chicago, and to New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere throughout our nation. Nor are they particularly tired, or cold, or hungry, or traumatized—they’re fed before they get on the bus, and they’re fed on the bus, which itself is warm and the seats sleepable.

The larger, overarching, fact is that Johnson and his cronies in those other cities—Progressive-Democrat Mayors Eric Adams, Karen Bass, et al., are actively inviting, calling come one, come all, those illegal aliens into their cities by loudly proclaiming them to be sanctuary for all illegal aliens. Even at that, the numbers of illegal aliens that these sanctuary cities receive over a period of months is what Texas’ (and Arizona’s) border towns—not even cities, many of them—receive in the course of a day or two to a week.

If Johnson and his were serious about their cities’ claimed level of ability to deal with what they have, with the influx of illegals overlaid, they’d take at least a first step and stop being sanctuaries and instead help get the for illegals deported.

Johnson, in particular, seems to have joined the Let’s Go Brandon chorale.