Tag Archives: politics

He’s Right

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But not in the way he thinks. Joe Calvello, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdami’s Press Secretary, said this:

That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken.

“That” was referring to Ken Griffin, his high-value secondary home in New York City, and his supposed failure to pay a deliberately, cynically undefined “fair share” of taxes. After all, Calvello says that the tax system “rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink….”

“The tax system,” the city’s, the State’s, and the nation’s are, indeed, broken. The fix, though, is not to constantly raise taxes on those Evil Rich like Griffin. The fix is something so inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, including Mamdani, that they can’t even say the words: lower tax rates on the middle class and poor, and more broadly, restructure the tax system and its taxing targets so that those middle class and poor pay the same low tax rates on the same things as the Evil Rich do.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

Louisiana Primary Elections

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry has canceled the State’s upcoming primary elections in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s Congressional district map as unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. A Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress, Lindsay Garcia, and voter Eugene Collins (whose presence appears to be nothing more than a device to give Garcia standing to sue) has sued to stop the cancelation.

They also called on refraining “from disenfranchising any qualified Louisiana voter or de-listing any qualified candidate in any contest on the May 16, 2026 or June 27, 2026 ballot.”
“It cannot conduct a primary under a remedial map that does not yet exist, in a remedial proceeding that has not yet begun, before a court that does not yet have jurisdiction,” the suit reads.

Far more importantly, though, the State cannot conduct a primary under a map that is unconstitutional and so unusable. No voter is disenfranchised by canceling the present elections; they would, however, be wholly disenfranchised by their voting based on an illegal district map. Nor are any existing candidates delisted, except by being left to campaign in an illegally drawn district via an erroneously listed ballot.

None of the candidates of any of the parties know, at present, who their constituents are, and even more important, none of Louisiana’s voters know, today, who their prospective Representatives might be. The ones cannot campaign effectively, and the others cannot vote effectively.

It’s necessary that the State’s primary elections be held in abeyance until a usable district map is put in place. Once the new map is in place, all of the existing candidates, along with any new candidates who might appear, will remain eligible and listed on the ballots—just on the correct ballots. All of the voters will know the legal district in which they’ll vote, and they’ll know who their prospective Representatives will be.

The Progressive-Democrat’s suit is without merit and should be dismissed promptly as the apparen stall effort that it is.

A Solution

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Last year, a People’s Republic of China-owned and -operated mine in Zambia had a catastrophic failure of a mine tailings wall, creating an environmental disaster for Zambian citizens.

[A] tailings dam owned by Sino-Metals collapsed and unleashed toxic sludge into the Kafue River, farmlands along the river valley are scorched, hundreds of people lack a source of clean drinking water and residents continue to live on land contaminated with heavy metals.

The Zambian government meekly aided the PRC and its mine operators in covering up this disaster, trying to hide it from the public. To hell with its own citizens who still are paying with their health and their lives for the failure, now of their own government in addition to that of the PRC and its mine operators.

According to a US House Select Committee on China,

The Zambian government, which owes $6.6 billion to the Chinese government and Chinese lenders, has held back from pressing Sino-Metals over the disaster, fearing retaliation from China….

Retaliation. Here’s an alternate solution: cancel the contract with Sino-Metals and all other PRC “investments” and “loans” in Zambia, declare the $6.6 billion debt reclassified as the PRC’s and Sino-Metals’ debt to Zambia for the cleanup, and dare the PRC to retaliate in any material way.

No actual dollars would flow from this, but two salutary things would result: Zambia would be freed from a debt it never should have taken on in the first place—PRC terms are notoriously usurious and are designed for to force default and confiscation of the collateral (here, the mine itself) put up for the loan. Zambia also would be out from under the PRC’s thumb and free(r) to trade its wealth of natural resources to more honorable nations under more equitable terms.

Primary Elections and Redistricting

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With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Louisiana v Callais et al. many more States are looking hard at redoing their district maps, ostensibly to eliminate Voting Rights Act-centered racial gerrymandering, and to enhance (Republican) partisan gerrymandering.

For good or ill (ill, I say), the current potential move very strongly emphasizes partisan gerrymandering. In the way, though, is the fact that many of the States looking here have already begun mail-in balloting for their primaries, or have completed their primary elections.

That’s an impediment, but I don’t see it as an impassable barrier. Primary elections are not final elections; those don’t occur until well after the political parties have made their nominations. Following those party decisions, the nominees will have months during which to campaign before the actual elections occur.

The dispositive factor, it seems to me, is that primary elections are strictly party-run elections; they are not bound by the laws for district/State/nation-wide elections. These party-run elections are conducted under party rules, albeit within overarching, generalized State criteria. Indeed, most jurisdictions limit primary election voting to members of the particular party fielding its own prospective candidate list. The general voting public isn’t involved in most of these jurisdictions.

That suggests to me that it’s a straightforward matter to cancel primaries in progress (as Louisiana is doing with its upcoming primary season), declare null completed primaries, and (re)hold them after a State’s redistricting effort is complete or has legislatively failed.