Tag Archives: politics

Yes, “They” Did

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On this, Karl Rove is broadly wrong.

Our culture is built on the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do. People can be influenced by words they hear and groups they’re part of.

So far, so good.

However, there are vulnerable people of all ages who can be, and are, influenced to deadly action. “They” know this full well. “They” are the Left’s and the Left’s politicians’ carefully crafted environment of divisiveness and violent and violence-inspiring anti-Republican, anti-Conservative, anti-right leaning Americans.

  • New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer standing on the Supreme Court building steps threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of them
  • Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders likening Conservative Republicans to fascism, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against a gathering of Republicans at a baseball practice
  • Sanders and them-President Joe Biden likening Republicans and then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump to Hitler, followed shortly by two assassination attempts against Trump
  • Jimmy Kimmel nakedly lying about Charlie Kirk in the hours after Kirk’s murder, insisting Kirk was a Jew-hating bigot
  • Other Leftists claiming Kirk’s killer was a Republican
  • The New York Times nakedly smearing Kirk as a Jew-hater and only posting a correction after an enormous outpouring of opprobrium, and then burying its correction instead of giving it the same prominence as its lie
  • The left, relying on their Newspeak Dictionary, distorting MAGA as though it were some right-wing crazies, rather that the hope and dream of every American to Make America Great Again—the American English dictionary definition of the acronym

Just one example of the outcomes of the Left’s and Party’s constructed environment comes from “Bowser,” a protestor supporting the murder of an insurance company executive:

Bowser says[:] “Political violence is how this country was established.”

“They” know full well that the hostile environment they constructed would influence more than one of their minions to violence. That carefully crafted overtly hostile environment most assuredly facilitated—made possible—Kirk’s murder by influencing one vulnerable young man to commit that murder.

Until we broadly recognize that simple environmental fact, and yes, that includes the Karl Roves and the others who insist on downplaying the Left’s artificial political climate, and act on that recognition, that Left and their Party politicians will continue to spout their rhetoric of violence, continue to proselytize their hostility toward those who are not of them, and their atmosphere of hate will continue to cause murders to be committed among the rest of us.

Leaks

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Leading off a Wall Street Journal article alleging Pentagon internal lawyers’ concerns regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of drug boats in international Caribbean Sea waters, there’s this:

Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications of President Trump’s expanding military campaign against Latin American-based drug cartels, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Leave aside the worries about the legality of destroying boats and the crews on them that are targeting American citizens with those poisons. Of course, there’s nothing illegal about destroying those attacks in progress.

The larger question is this: who are those people with knowledge? They’re speaking without authorization, discussing in public matters of national security, and they’re doing so in direct violation of their terms of employment by the government, and depending on who they are, perhaps in violation of their oaths of office.

Some defense officials and career military lawyers have provided written and verbal legal opinions to decision makers inside the Pentagon, but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined, according to one of the people.

This is pretty dispositive—in the WSJ‘s own words—of these people’s deliberate violation of their employment parameters. And all because these wonders actually think they run the show, and are quite cross that they’re not being heeded on the spot.

These are people—these are leakers—who need to be identified and fired for cause.

There’s Always an Excuse

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Recall that Bureau of Labor Statistics honcho Erika McEntarfer was fired over labor reports that reflected wildly inaccurate data and that necessitated radically large corrections in subsequent months. Those data may have been fudged, as President Donald Trump (R) suggests, or they may have resulted from badly inaccurate and incomplete data collection by the BLS’ periodic polling processes.

Now she’s speaking out.

While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.

And making self-serving excuses. She took office in January 2024. DOGE didn’t start in until early 2025.

Two questions, then: the first is what progress had she made on her improvements in the intervening year? What bureaucratic impediments had been interfering with those efforts, and what had she been doing about those impeding bureaucrats?

McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.

She spent that whole year “preparing to” help? When was she going actually to get started? When was she going to start leading the effort rather than “helping” it?

The second question is in what way had DOGE been interfering with her efforts, and what resources had she diverted from stats improvement to dealing with—mostly interfering with—DOGE’s efforts?

Dealing with the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China has decided that the American company Nvidia has violated PRC anti-trust laws and is holding the company hostage in trade negotiations with the US.

China’s antitrust regulator said Monday that a preliminary investigation found Nvidia violated the country’s antimonopoly law in connection with an acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing, and it didn’t elaborate on the alleged violations or say whether it would punish Nvidia.

The PRC is centering its case on Nvidia’s commitment to not cut the PRC off from its chips as a condition of PRC approval of the acquisition. That might make a basis for a legitimate anti-trust beef; however:

Since 2022, the US. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial-intelligence chips to China.

Here is the PRC threatening an American company for its compliance with American law.

There are now two strong reasons for American companies to walk away from the PRC and discontinue all business with PRC-domiciled companies or within the PRC under any guise. One is the overt interference with the domestic affairs of our nation. If the PRC doesn’t like our government’s block of Nvidia, et al., selling their best chips into the PRC, its beef is with our government, not with the American businesses it tries to take hostage in its “negotiations” with our government.

The other reason is the PRC’s presumption that it should have veto authority over whether an American company acquires, or otherwise takes a stake in, any non-PRC-domiciled company. If American companies stop doing business in/with the PRC, then the PRC has no approval/disapproval authority over acquisitions—it becomes irrelevant. And that’s as it should be with an enemy nation.

Obamacare Subsidies and Appropriations Bills

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen and Senators are attempting to extort Republicans into surrendering on extending/restoring Progressive-Democrat-passed (in 2021) Obamacare expanded subsidies.

Unfortunately, they’ll likely succeed, as too many Republicans in each house are too timid to stand their ground.

Never mind that if those Republicans would crawl out from under their desks, they easily could make the case that any government shutdown would be (and after the realization, was) the sole doing of those Progressive-Democrats. It’s those Party members, after all, who threatened to close our government if they weren’t meekly obeyed and who in the realization did close our government.

These Republicans think they face regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ announcement is a chimera, too. The Federal government never really shuts down. With current tax law, funds come flowing in to Federal coffers are plenty for the Federal government to keep paying, on schedule, almost all of existing Federal outlays. The losses from any supposed shutdown would be primarily via Federal contracts with businesses that provide services to the Feds, but most of these businesses would be made whole under the terms of those same contracts.

The larger, underlying problem this extortion exposes, though, is the Republicans’ failure, in their aggregate, to pass all of the dozen separate appropriations bills they’re nominally required to pass every year. These appropriations bills are the actual spending bills that commit actual dollars that the Federal government has committed through its various allocation bills, which is where the government says what it wants to fund. Appropriations are those funds.

Had the Republicans in Congress actually passed those dozen bills on schedule, or at least by the end of the current fiscal year (which has another week left, so theoretically they still could), as they promised at the start of the year and of which they’ve only passed three or four, there would be no risk of a shutdown, and the Progressive-Democrats would have no extortion bricks to throw threw government windows.

Will the Republicans learn this lesson for the second year of this Congressional session? They never have in the past. I’m not holding my breath for the future.