Tag Archives: politics

A No-Filibuster Senate

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The Wall Street Journal editors worry about Arizona’s Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision not to run for reelection, coupled with West Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement, and how those decisions will affect the Senate filibuster. The editors correctly predict the end of the filibuster if the Progressive-Democrats maintain their Senate majority after the coming elections, and they suggest the ravages of the resulting one-party rule:

  • doubling the national minimum wage
  • mandating a British NIH-style national health care program—Medicare for All—and damn the cost or reduction in quality of health care
  • enacting national “right” to abortion
  • a 35% corporate tax
  • union favoritism
  • enacting nationwide mail voting

The editors then, with breathtaking innocence, suggest that the next time Republicans were to control Congress and the White House, they could abolish all of these. However, once the Progressive-Democrats get control of our Federal government is so sweeping, filibusterless way, on what basis do these editors think any opposition party could ever win a national election again?

For all of those risks, though, the editors missed the one that would impact the last bastion of our republican form of government. With no filibuster, Party could easily stack the Supreme Court and install their activist Justices, who would then issue rulings entirely consistent with Party’s disdain for our Constitution. That would be the end of the Supreme Court, and of so much more.

The stakes for our republic are that high.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Impact of Biden’s Border and Immigration Policies on Employment

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Another outcome of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disdain for our national borders and for actually vetting who comes into our nation is this. Notice, too, that the graph isn’t some tenuously done aggregation of data from questionable sources; it’s a FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) graph.

In just February, 1.2 million immigrants (legal and illegal) gained a job. Meanwhile, 500k native-born Americans LOST their job.
Since Covid, native-born workers have actually LOST 2 million jobs. All of the net job gains are immigrants.

 

The sharp dip is from the Wuhan Virus Situation. After that, the sharp increase in employment is nearly exclusively from a mix of immigrants, temporary and otherwise, and illegal aliens, whom the poster euphemistically terms “illegal immigrants.”

In just February, there were those 1.2 million immigrants of one sort or another. In January, the latest month for which data are publicly available, there were more than 176,000 illegal aliens encountered at the Southern Border, and an unknown number of undetected illegal aliens. Those 176,000 are roughly one-seventh of that total.

The problem here isn’t that immigrants are successfully competing with “native born” Americans for jobs. It’s that all those illegal aliens appear to be successfully competing in an arena they should never have access to.

Biden Wants a Port on the Gaza Strip

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He said so in his Thursday State of the Union speech. He said he’s ordering the US military to set up and establish a port on the coast of the Gaza Strip. He’ll do it, though, with no US boots on the ground. US personnel will be on offshore military vessels, but they will not install the port onshore.

He was careful not to say, though, who would distribute the humanitarian aid that would be coming ashore. The only distribution personnel ashore, though, are UN, Hamas terrorists, and the IDF.

With the UN actively supporting the Hamas terrorists through its UNWRA arm and those same terrorists so busily and successfully intercepting and stealing aid coming in through the Strip’s border with Egypt, this only means that Biden will be supporting Hamas terrorists with more humanitarian aid more directly.

Lastly, with US personnel not being the ones to install the temporary port, our Navy is losing the only thing of value to the effort: practice in rapidly installing a temporary port under unfriendly, if not outright hostile, conditions.

On other thing, beyond lastly: for how long after Hamas’ war on Israel is over will this temporary port remain in place and who will pay for it? Biden won’t say.

Not even Jimmy Carter was this foolish. He, at least, was willing to take a direct shot at freeing American hostages, even if that effort blew up in his face, from bad weather among other problems. Biden is too timid even to try to get our hostages away from the Hamas terrorists. He’d rather supply them and push Israel to stop short of destroying the terrorists in his naked attempt to pay ransom to Evil.

The PRC Wants Us Out Of There

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The People’s Republic of China wants our technology and hardware out of that nation in its drive for self-sufficiency.

The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling US technology out of the country—an effort some refer to as “Delete A,” for Delete America.
Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren’t allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.

This is something we should be doing regarding PRC products in the US. Their surveillance cameras on US military bases, which our Pentagon procurement agents actively bought demonstrates the danger here, as does PRC espionage equipment on the ship-to-shore cranes in our ports are demonstrating today.

I agree with the PRC’s move. We should be out of the PRC, and that includes us no longer using PRC facilities to build stuff or the components for stuff. We need to relocate all of our PRC usages to other, non-enemy nations.

Beyond that, we need to stop importing PRC products altogether.