Tag Archives: responsibilities

Toddler Temper Tantrums and the Fears of the Timid

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Karl Rove may be whistling past the graveyard in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed. He opened his piece with this lede:

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will lose the US House this fall. That may be right.

Then he ran a counterargument.

Yet the conventional wisdom that Republicans will lose the House may be wrong.
One reason is retirements. Much has been made of how many Republicans are leaving, including talented members such as Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers. But more Democrats (24) than Republicans (19) have announced their retirements. Moreover, all the Republican retirements are in overwhelmingly red districts. The only open GOP seat considered competitive—the Cook Political Report calls it “lean Republican”—is Colorado’s Third District. Cook’s partisan vote index—which estimates a district’s leaning relative to the country based on the two most recent presidential elections—labels it an R+7 seat.
Retiring Democrats represent more-competitive seats. Cook rates the open Michigan Seventh and Eighth districts as “toss-ups.” They are R+2 and R+1 respectively. Cook classifies the California 47th (D+3) and Virginia Seventh (D+1) as “lean Democrat.” The Maryland Sixth and New Hampshire Second (both D+2) are “likely Democrat.”

Rove gave too little credence to the damage the toddler temper tantrum, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) and her Chaos Caucus supporters, does. These toddlers may well hand the House Speakership, and control of the House agenda, to the Progressive-Democrat Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) before the current session ends, especially given the number of nominally Conservative Republicans who are abjectly cutting and running from their House seats, whether at the end of the current session or quitting just as soon as they can get their desks cleared.

The inability of Republicans to agree among themselves on what to put forward—the Chaos Caucus blows up anything that doesn’t suit their veriest whims to t—and the party’s timidity in putting any Conservative policies forward and putting the onus on the Progressive-Democrat-ruled Senate and the White House to work with them—tells the voting public that this is a ragtag collection of junior high politicians not ready for the national obligations they have.

Rove also gave too little effect to the timidity of the remaining “mainstream” Republican Congressmen. There are number of legitimate conservative policies that are proposed by the Freedom Caucus (when they aren’t acting in their Chaos Caucus guise). These, though, are routinely rejected by too many of the other Republicans in the House Republican caucus under the excuse that the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators would never agree to them, and that the Progressive-Democrat President would never sign, even were something to get to his desk. So, these Republicans won’t even try. They’re too timid to do something that might force the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians to take a stand, much less to force them to work with Republicans. Instead, these Timid Republicans would rather try, meekly, to work with the Progressive-Democrats, ceding functional House control to the minority party.

That timidity isn’t encouraging for voters.

Rove also underestimated the effect on voters by those who are heading out the door just as the battle is heating up. That timidity may well turn off voters, voters who won’t vote for the overtly destructive Progressive-Democratic Party, but who find they can’t trust Republican candidates who might well run away themselves. These voters are likely to stay home, which with today’s divisions is the same as voting Progressive-Democrat.

More Progressive-Democrats (my term, not Rove’s) than Republicans are leaving the fight? Only by five, and that, out of 43 departures, is as thin as the current Republican nominal majority. The Republican Party, too, has demonstrated in elections from 2018 forward that it’s fully capable of throwing away eminently winnable seats and donating them to the Progressive-Democrats. It would take only a net gain of five seats to get Jeffries as Speaker.

Public disgust with a Republican Party populated, at least at the national level, with toddlers and timids may well cost us a government interested in our borders, our economic strength—our national security.

Whistling past the graveyard, indeed.

Progressive-Democratic Party’s War on Christianity

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As part of the White House’s Easter celebration and Easter Egg Hunt, the White House held an Easter Art Event. This year, thought, that art contest was censored.

Children of National Guard members are not allowed to submit artwork with religious symbolism for the White House’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event [apparently separate from Jill Biden’s EGGucation theme].
This year, the Adjutants General of the National Guard requested on behalf of First Lady Jill Biden for the children of parents in the National Guard to submit artwork with the theme, “Celebrating our Military Families.”
According to the rules, the Easter egg design “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

Apparently, Guardsmen or their children aren’t capable of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus as part of celebrating military families. Or such a celebration is questionable.

Perhaps instead, art centered on breakfast tacos would have been acceptable to Jill Biden, in lieu of overtly Christian art on one of the most important and overtly Christian holidays during this White House event that used to be an Easter-centered event. Cynically,

Other material that is prohibited from the designs include “material that promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any group or individual or promotes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.”

Except for us Christians. Bigotry, hatred, or harm against us Christians by our children’s exclusion from the children’s art contest based on our religion, was perfectly fine.

It is, though, entirely consistent with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cynical deprecation of Easter by declaring the day a Transgender Day of Visibility.

More Revisionist History

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The Food and Drug Administration has decided to remove social media posts and online materials commentary that overtly disdained and recommended against the use of Ivermectin as a Wuhan Virus infection treatment.

It’s good for the FDA to correct its dismal performance regarding Wuhan Virus treatments, but trying to pretend—even if its pretense is public this time—its dismal performance never happened by deleting those posts is just dishonest. The honest thing to do would have been to bring those posts back to the fore and append to them the FDA’s corrections regarding Ivermectin’s efficacy and safety.

Unfortunately, the move to alter history and deny the occurrence of actions that had plainly occurred, rather than treat the misbehavior honestly, comes as a result of a law suit settlement in which the sole plaintiff agreed to the revisionist move.

That’s how deeply embedded dishonesty about our recent history has gotten in our society.

Well, NSS

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The United Nations—all these months since the terrorist Hamas attacked Israel and butchered 1,400+ civilian men, women, and children, raping women and children(!)—has finally concluded

there are grounds to believe sexual violence, including rape, occurred during the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and that there is clear and credible evidence that female hostages were raped.

Because the reports of the women who were raped and lived to tell the tale, or the men and women who were eyewitness to the rapes, weren’t enough in real time, either in their words or in the numbers of women saying those words.

The [UN’s] report said it didn’t have enough information to attribute the sexual violence and rape to Hamas or any other armed groups.

Yeah. Because it’s possible that, while the terrorist attacks were in progress, those rapes might have been committed by responding IDF soldiers, or by the rape victims’ fellow kibbutz members, or by the demons in the UN “report” writers’ fetid imaginations.

Just one more example of the broad anti-Israel ideology so deeply embedded in the United Nations.

“Structural Changes”

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Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google offered this evasion regarding his company’s program:

No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Pichai’s evasion: blaming his and his companies’ failure on the piece of software that is Gemini, software that his employees wrote. Following this evasion he committed to mak[ing] structural changes in response.

No. Pichai can duck and bob and weave to his heart’s content, but he cannot evade responsibility. The fault, dear Sudar, is not in your software, but in yourself.

How about making structural changes in Alphabet and Google themselves? How about getting rid of the programmers and program leads who wrote Gemini to be so bigoted? How about getting rid of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, who created and maintained the corporate culture of bigotry that gave birth to Gemini?