Tag Archives: political parties

It Doesn’t Get any Clearer than This

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The citizens of California want to have a State referendum on taxes, specifically a vote on the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, in November 2024. The Act would limit the State government’s ability to raise taxes on those good citizens.

Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom has joined John Burton, ex-State Progressive-Democratic Party Chairman, in an emergency(!) petition to the State’s Supreme Court to get the initiative removed from that election. The measure if passed, Newsom and Burton worry, would gut the administrative state and shift the longstanding balance of powers in California back toward the State’s legislative branch.

Gut the administrative state. Increase the power of the citizens’ more direct representatives in their House and Senate.

To hell with democracy, especially to hell with representative democracy.

…voters will be harmed if the Measure appears on the November 5, 2024 ballot….

The State Knows Better and must not be constrained by these…commoners.

As goes California’s State Progressive-Democratic Party, so goes the national Progressive-Democratic Party.

This is what’s on the national ballot—however sotto voce—in 2024.

See No Evil

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The Hamas terrorists coordinated their assault on Israel with the terrorist Hezbollah, and both had serious planning help from Iran, via that nation’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is from senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions….
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas…and Hezbollah….

And

A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government…gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.

But our Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, through his State Department Secretary, Antony Blinken, insists

We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.

Appease evil, instead.

Couple Thoughts re Ramaswamy’s Thoughts

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Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has some ideas about what to do were he to be elected President. I have some ideas about those ideas.

Let’s have a reasonable path to peace. Make a permanent commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO, but in return, require Russia to exit its military partnership with China. Now that weakens China. Now, Xi Jinping is gonna have to think twice before going after Taiwan.

This is breathtakingly naïve. On what basis does Ramaswamy think Putin would honor any agreement? Russia already has welched on the Budapest Memoranda, Minsk I, and Minsk II, and he faked his 2014 “referendum” that he used to rationalize his occupation of Crimea. That’s just Russia’s recent history with Ukraine. Then there’s Putin’s avowed goal of reconstituting the Russia’s Soviet (Union) empire. Ramaswamy’s plan for this “peace” of his also includes an in-place cessation of the fighting—forcing Ukraine to surrender the 20%, or so, of its territory that Putin currently occupies to him, which only rewards Putin for his invasion.

Then there’s the bit about Russia leaving its alliance with the People’s Republic of China, which he alleges would weaken the PRC. What makes Ramaswamy think that alliance itself doesn’t weaken the PRC? Russia desperately needs money and weapons/ammunition. Iran and northern Korea can’t supply any of that in sufficient numbers; only the PRC can—at the expense of its own finances and military equipage. Beyond that, the PRC already is spending treasure propping up the Russian economy and war effort.

Finally, there’s the fact that Russia winning in Ukraine—getting to keep those 20%—would only embolden Xi, not give him pause.

…doubling down on his promise to shrink the federal bureaucracy by 70%….

This actually is a worthy goal. However. There are some 2 million civilians employed by the Federal government. Assume, arguendo, he’s capable of getting rid of those 70%. What’s his timeline for terminating 1.4 million civilians? He never says. What will be the impact (viz., unemployment insurance, food stamps) of dumping 1.4 million out-of-work workers onto the private economy? He never says anything about that, either. How will he handle the nation’s economic dislocation resulting from dumping 1.4 million more out-of-work workers onto the private economy? He never says anything about that, either.

Why Isn’t It a Concern?

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Crime in the District of Columbia is rampant and rising. DC isn’t alone in this regard; that’s the case in a broad variety of Progressive-Democratic Party-run cities. The remark of DC’s Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, Lindsey Appiah, is strongly illustrative of the general problem, though:

I definitely think public safety has been and continues to be the No. 1 concern for district residents[.]

However.

In DC,

  • 216 homicides this year, 38% more than at this point in 2022
  • robberies are up 70%
  • car thefts have more than doubled

Why don’t the persons of the DC government also think public safety has been and continues to be the No. 1?

Choosing not to Understand

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The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has broadened an existing injunction that bars various Federal agencies from colluding with social media to censor speech to include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The court wrote, in part,

CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had “switchboarded” was true or false….
Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently. Rather, the platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information. Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment[.]

Here’s the Federal government’s overt decision to not understand the matter of free speech as it appeals the ruling to the Supreme Court [paraphrased by Fox News]:

the government faced “irreparable harm” because [5th Circuit Federal Judge Terry, who ordered the first injunction] Doughty’s order may prevent the federal government from “working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.

This is, to use the legal jargon’s term, a steaming crock. The order in no way bars the Federal government—its bureaucrats and its political appointees—from working with social media companies. It only bars the Federal government’s from defining what speech constitutes “grave harm,” and it bars those personnel from pressuring social media to implement those definitions and then to censor speech based on those definitions.

The order in no way bars the Federal government’s personnel from working with social media companies to publish, also (not instead of), those folks’ own, answering, speech that debates the information an original speaker has offered and with which the Federal government’s bureaucrats or politicians disagree.

The Biden administration personnel know that full well; hence their conscious decision to pretend to not understand the basic principle of free speech and why the Federal government is Constitutionally barred from interfering with it. The grave harm stems from those government personnel’s attempt to disregard the First Amendment.

The 5th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.