Tag Archives: politics

Hypocrisy of Progressive-Democrats

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Recall the bodice-ripping and the hysterical threats to counter-gerrymander engaged in by Progressive-Democrat politicians and governors, particularly the governors of California and Illinois, because Texas gerrymandered. Here is a table showing the extent of Progressive-Democrat gerrymandering, done explicitly to limit, even to completely shut out, the Republican Party from their States’ Congressional delegations (California and Illinois highlighted).

MA: 36% Republican, 0 seats
CT: 42% Republican, 0 seats
ME: 46% Republican, 0 seats
NM: 46% Republican, 0 seats
NH: 48% Republican, 0 seats
RI: 42% Republican, 0 seats
VT: 32% Republican, 0 seats
HI: 38% Republican, 0 seats
DE: 42% Republican, 0 seats

CA: 38% Republican, only 9 of 52 seats (20.9%)
IL: 44% Republican, only 3 of 17 seats (17.6%)
NY: 43% Republican, only 7 of 26 seats (26.9%)
MD: 34% Republican, only 1 of 8 seats (12.5%)
NJ: 46% Republican, only 3 of 12 seats (25%)
OR: 41% Republican, only 1 of 6 seats (16.7%)

This is their dishonesty, too, since hypocrisy is a subset of that.

H/t Frank Tuslow and ralflongwalker.

Not Really

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President Donald Trump (R) wants the Senate to get rid of its Blue Slip Rule, which a couple of New Jersey Progressive-Democrats used to block attorney Alina Habba’s Senate confirmation as US Attorney for New Jersey even from getting out of committee. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors claim that threatens the Senate’s role in the checks and balance structure of our Federal government. Never mind the editors’ obfuscatory natterings about the machinations Trump has been going through to get her in that position as Acting US Attorney; the alleged threat to checks and balances is the thrust of their editorial.

The editors finished with this in their penultimate paragraph:

Yet that’s [getting rid of the Blue Slip process] up to the Senate, and the Founders gave the chamber its advise-and-consent power for a reason.

The role of the Senate under our Constitution, in the present context, is precisely to provide advice and where warranted consent to a President’s nominations. That’s the whole Senate, though, not one or two self-important or virtue-signaling (or both) Senators. Even the erstwhile filibuster of judicial nominations required a significant collection of Senators—more than 40 of them—to enact a block.

The time of Blue Slips never was, legitimately, and it’s time for the blockage to be cleared away.

Why Ukraine Won’t Surrender the Donetsk

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The reasons proffered center on the defensive lines of barriers that Ukraine as developed in holding onto the region and the barbarian’s demand that Ukraine surrender the region so he doesn’t have to fight his way across them.

Russia wants the entire region of Donetsk, including the 25% that Ukraine still controls, an unoccupied swath larger than Delaware. A heavily reinforced defensive line, known as the fortress belt, has stopped the Russians from rolling deeper westward, and Ukraine has no plans to surrender the area.

That’s entirely wrong. The Ukraine defense works are, in fact, every bit as formidable to a modern army as the Maginot Line was to then-modern armies. That’s why the Nazi German forces bypassed the line in Nazi Germany’s invasion of France, even violating Belgian neutrality to do so. So it is in eastern/southeastern Ukraine.

Is it a sign of Russian weakness to demand the region as the article’s subheadline has it?

It is the site of a reinforced defensive line, the “fortress belt.” Putin’s demand for it is a sign of weakness.

No. The defensive barriers are neither here nor there. As with that Maginot Line, it would be straightforward enough for the barbarian to bypass those barriers, here, around either or both ends. On the contrary, it’s a sign of Russian recognition of the industrial importance of the Donetsk to Ukraine (recall the deindustrialization of Germany and the packing up and moving of whole factories from western Germany into eastern France at the end of WWI), and it’s a sign of the importance of the mineral and rare earth wealth of the Donetsk both to Ukraine (and to the West) and to Russia.

The sooner the West recognizes that and internalizes it, the sooner the West can set about properly supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for survival.

Nationalizing Companies

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The Wall Street Journal editors are badly mistaken here.

Mr Trump accused Kamala Harris of being a socialist, but the Biden Administration never nationalized companies.

Routine political polemics on the first part of that; functionally, and obviously, wrong on the second part.

Nationalizing individual companies is piffle. The Obama reign nationalized a whole industry—our health care “insurance” coverage industry via Obamacare, which required all of us to buy an Obamacare policy whether we wanted to or not, whether we needed one or not.

It’s true that the Biden administration didn’t formally nationalize any companies, but it functionally nationalized far more industries than that piker Obama with the Biden administration’s excessive regulation: ICE-powered vehicles and our energy production industries, our banking industry with its pressure to lend to these types and refuse to lend to those types, and even our press with its pressure to spike these news reports and to push those news reports, all the while pushing for editorials that favored administration ideologies while panning or ignoring policies of which Biden and his minions disapproved.

None of this is to suggest that the Federal government taking an ownership stake in Intel or any company is a good idea or even an acceptable one. It isn’t. But it’s telling that these opinion writers can make such an obviously wrong claim at the outset of their piece.

Add some Teeth to It

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Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ) is proposing legislation that would modify the DC Home Rule Act. The piece of interest to me is his Make DC Safe Again Act. Biggs’ proposal would lengthen from 30 days to 180 days the emergency period in which the president can take control of DC police.

I’d like some teeth added to that. Specifically, require DC to pay the costs of the Feds assuming control of the local police unless the DC governing body requests Federal intervention. I’d also like to see legislation that would apply that principle nationwide. Portland of 2020 (especially, but also extending into today) and Los Angeles of the current summer stand as firm examples of that necessity.