Tag Archives: politics

What are they Going to Do about It?

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The Wall Street Journal opened its house editorial with this:

The gerrymander race to the bottom escalated on Tuesday as Democrats in Virginia won a narrow victory to redraw their state map to add as many as four Democratic House seats. This is bad news for GOP control of the House in November, but Republicans can also blame President Trump for starting this rolling rock that has now come down on their heads.

Say that’s true—and it likely is. It’s also true, though, that Texas was pressured by the courts to redraw its Congressional district maps because, those courts had decided, the then-just-drawn map was overly racially gerrymandered. However, the State’s Republican-led legislature didn’t need to redraw its map the way it did, if the goal was only to correct a court-claimed racial mistake.

At bottom, though, the question is, So what? This is where the Republicans are, regardless of how they got here.

What are they going to do about it? Wasting time, energy, and resources pointing fingers is time, energy, and resources they should be putting into unifying their party and dealing constructively with the situation—national as well as local—as it is. That begins with individual candidates getting out among their constituents, Left, Right, and Center, and talking directly to them about the candidates’ concrete policies and how those are better than the Progressive-Democrats’ and how each Republican candidate’s policies will directly benefit each set of constituents.

How Unfit is Unfit?

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UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer (Labour) is busily screwing the pooch. His latest failures are two, and both are related to his choice of Ambassador to the US.

For months, Starmer had insisted that his government followed “due process” in appointing Mandelson as US envoy, telling lawmakers repeatedly that Mandelson had been vetted and cleared by UK security services for the post.
On Thursday, it emerged that Mandelson had, in fact, failed his security clearance but was approved for the job anyway.

Then,

Starmer said Thursday he wasn’t aware Mandelson had failed his vetting process….

That Starmer blamed others for his ignorance and fired a scapegoat is neither here nor there against the enormity of his failures here.

The real upshot is that either Starmer has been lying through his…teeth…or he’s utterly incompetent. Either one alone demonstrates his unfitness for public office, much less for heading up the British government.

Parliament’s MPs shouldn’t be wasting time nattering on about how Starmer should resign. The MPs should simply dump him with a no-confidence vote. Absent that, they’re as timid, waffle-y, and incompetent or dishonest as Starmer.

Broken Windows Enforcement?

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The Trump Doctrine in progress. That’s Matthew Continetti’s thesis in his Free Expression piece, The Trump Doctrine in Action. His subheadline summarizes:

Major military operations in Venezuela and Iran make America, and the world, safer.

This is the mechanism for that increased safety:

Mr Trump cares less about a regime’s structure and ideology—whether it’s authoritarian or democratic, Chavista or Islamist—than its conduct. He cycles between negotiations and war, between economic punishment and military force, until he elicits the desired behavior.

Maybe, though, Continetti’s understanding doesn’t go far enough. Maybe what President Trump (R) is doing is this. Instead of taking on our peer and near-peer enemies directly—they are, after all, the most serious and direct threats to our nation’s sovereignty and freedom–he’s going after their satraps and clients, which weakens those enemies and limits their long-term and larger scale activities.

Is this broken windows enforcement on a nation-level scale? Broken picture windows enforcement, maybe? Or maybe hogwash. We’ll have to see over time whether Russia and/or the People’s Republic of China change their behaviors with the success of one window enforcement—Venezuela—the so far apparent success of another—Iran—and whether the next—Cuba—is attempted and, if so, successful.

A Problem of their own Making

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the People’s Republic of China’s setting up trade-centric “retaliatory tools,” there’s this bit in the middle of the piece:

The rules could put US and other Western companies in a bind: they need to comply with US restrictions on trade with China and often want to reduce their reliance on Chinese production, yet such actions expose them to punishment by Beijing and even possible expulsion from the world’s most important manufacturing hub.

Of course, if those companies weren’t in the PRC in the first place, the PRC couldn’t “punish” them. They’ve had plenty of time to move their supply chains and businesses out of that nation and plenty of warning regarding the necessity of doing so.

Still, there remains no time like the present to take serious heed and get moving on those adjustments.

A Conundrum

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A town in Massachusetts has laid it out. South Hadley had a referendum put in front of them that proposed a 50% property tax hike. Voting it down, said its pushers, would be the end of the town as residents knew it.

Override backers argued that the measures were vital to preserve schools and town services. Without a revenue infusion, officials had warned, major cuts loomed: no school sports or extracurriculars, slashed Advanced Placement classes, reduced police and public-works staffing, and more.

That “more” included slashed Advanced Placement offerings, along with hits to police and public-works staffing.

The town’s residents, though, made it clear they’ve had enough of tax increases with little to show for them but empty promises by the taxers. The referendum was voted down in no uncertain terms, 65% to 34%. The message of this defeat was clearly articulated by Rudy Ternbach, semiretired and leader of the anti-override group Alliance for Fair Taxes:

I think the results of the election show voters do not want to try and fix the government by increasing taxes on those least able to pay. They want more efficiencies in government and less taxes.

Sadly, but entirely predictably, the message was not received by Leftist tax-and-spenders. Lisa Wong, South Hadley’s Progressive-Democrat Town Manager:

“We will regroup and continue to communicate with the public on the changes ahead,” she said by text, adding that the town would also push for policy changes and greater support at the state and federal levels.

Politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party cannot conceive of cutting spending or leaving taxes alone, much less reducing them. Efficiencies in government? Pfft. Progressive-Democrats only want to increase people’s dependency on government, if not at their own level, then further up the government’s food chain.

This is a message to the rest of us and a lesson to be heeded come November.