Tag Archives: politics

Maybe End a Boycott?

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San Francisco is beginning to contemplate ending its travel ban to States of which the city’s governing Council disapproves because those States hold values that are too conservative to suit the Councilmen.

The move was largely seen as a boycott to pressure other states and prevent the city from engaging in business with those whose values it deemed antithetical to its own.

City Administrator Carmen Chu issued a report that suggests a negative outcome of the city’s move.

No states with restrictive LGBTQ rights, voting rights, or abortion policies have cited the City’s travel and contract bans as motivation for reforming their laws.

And especially [emphasis added],

Since 12X [the banning ordinance] became operative, the number of banned states has grown from 8 states in 2017 to 30 in 2022. This increase suggests that the City’s threat of boycott may not serve as a compelling deterrent to states considering restrictive policies. Only 1 state has ever been removed from the list.

Ya think?

However.

Even if San Francisco does lift its boycott, I still won’t travel to that city. The crime rate remains shockingly high, the threats of harassment and of assault by the homeless remains rampant on the city’s sidewalks, drug use and the threat of drug infections—even from the used drug needles lying about on those same sidewalks—remains too widespread, the vast piles of human and other animal feces on those same sidewalks remains too thick; the risks go on and on.

Further, San Francisco’s mayor and city council, despite all of that, continue to disparage the police and limit their ability to function.

San Francisco remains not worth the trouble of traveling to, much less doing business in or with.

Moderately Stern Letter to Follow

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken claims he wagged his finger very sternly warned his Chinese counterpart against providing Russia with “lethal support” in the invasion of Ukraine and he made it very clear that China must never violate US airspace again.

Blinken told CBS News‘ Face the Nation in an interview aired Sunday that he sent a strong message to Chinese Communist Party Central Foreign Affairs Office Director Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
“I made very clear to him that China sending a surveillance balloon over the United States, in violation of our sovereignty, in violation of international law, was unacceptable, and must never happen again[.]”

And this from State’s UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to CNN:

If there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that is unacceptable[.]

Sure. The PRC will back right down in the face of face-saving words from the man who so meekly accepted his a**-chewing at his first meeting with his…counterparts (the ellipsis because it’s mildly insulting to lower the PRC’s foreign ministers to the weak levels of our State Department) or from any of his subordinates.

Gun Control

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Versus gun rights. And police.

Squatters keep occupying another’s property in Lynnwood, WA, and using it as a stolen vehicle trafficking facility and as a residence. A police SWAT team raided the property and made some arrests. The owner changed the locks on the building. Then the squatters returned and resumed operations and residence.

In response to the reoccupation, Lieutenant David Hayes of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (Lynnwood’s county) told Fox News Digital that ensuring the squatters don’t return is “largely on the property owner.”

This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party mouthpieces are trying, functionally if not (necessarily) deliberately to prevent: a property owner defending her own property. A disarmed population via those gun “controls,” though, will be helpless against criminals and unable to satisfy their right and their obligation to defend their own property. Instead, they’ll be rendered entirely dependent on Government to for them rather than government’s (sic) local, county, and State police forces acting in assistance of the property owner.

In parallel with this, seemingly contradictorily, exponentially potentiating the police’s inability to support private citizens’ efforts, is the Left’s and Party’s ongoing—still!—efforts to defund and to shrink those same local, county, and State police forces.

It’s no wonder that whenever anyone in Party mounts an effort to disarm us, however seemingly mildly, there’s an increase in gun and ammunition sales.

“Common Sense”

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is attempting to use its Newspeak Dictionary to redefine “Nonsense” as “Common sense.” The latest example of this is President Joe Biden’s (D) latest call for “common sense” gun reforms. He made his latest demand in response to a series of murders with guns in Mississippi. In that series, the murderer used a shotgun and two handguns to murder six people across three locations in his single rampage. Biden’s demand:

That includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, fully closing the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.

Because any of that, like banning mythical devices—assault weapons and weapons of war on our streets—would have kept shotguns or handguns away from this murderer, or any other. And surely “high capacity magazines,” of whatever definition that becomes convenient from time to time to an overreaching government, would have kept shotguns and handguns away from criminals.

Holding gun manufacturers liable for the abuses of their products by criminals will only limit the availability of firearms to us honest ­average Americans. Oh, wait: that’s the goal of Party. Party members know full well that laws are ignored by criminals; that’s at the core of what makes them criminals.

Nonsense is common sense to Party. And Party expects us meekly to accept that. Or else.

Debt Limits and Spending

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The Congressional Budget Office is out with its projection for our nation’s economic future.

As for the much-discussed federal debt, the nearby chart shows how fast it has grown in the last several years. Debt held by the public—the kind we have to pay back to creditors like the Chinese and Japanese based on contracts—is now 97% of the economy, and will soon rise to 100% and keep going to 118.2% in 2033. How high can it go before creditors stop lending? No one knows, but it will be ugly if they do.

Here is that nearby chart:

This illustrates the tight relationship between spending and debt limits, and why future spending cuts must be part of negotiations related to raising today’s debt ceiling limit. It’s barely possible to see any effect from the 2011 debt limit increase that was agreed in exchange for some “freezing” of Federal spending levels, a pseudo-freeze that in the end ended rather quickly.

There need to be real reductions in Federal spending, not just a reduction in spending growth or even a pretend freeze. There’s plenty of room in welfare spending, for instance, for cutting. Furthermore, all Federal spending is discretionary, the bad habit of calling some spending mandatory notwithstanding. Finally, to put a legitimate floor under spending (which doesn’t contradict the forgoing because it’s a floor not a mandatedly ever-increasing level), there’s a Constitutional requirement to spend adequately on national defense and debt repayment.

In the end, too, tax rate cuts, leaving more money in the hands of private economy actors—us average Americans and our businesses—leads to increases in Federal revenues. This has been empirically demonstrated by every tax rate cut since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s reduction of the top rate from the neighborhood of 90% to the region of 70%.

Federal spending cuts coupled with Federal tax rate cuts—they’re win-win for our economy and our nation, if only the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians in Congress and the White House would get out of the way.