Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7063 which raises the age limit for performers and other employees of adult entertainment establishments—you know, strip clubs— from 18 to 21. DeSantis claims this legislation will “combat human trafficking.” Baloney. It is pure grandstanding, pandering to his supporters who object to sex shows generally on moral grounds, and more to the point, it is unethical age discrimination.
The issue is simple: are 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds adult citizens with all the rights of adult citizens, or aren’t they? (Hint: they are.) Since they are, there is no justification for a state telling them that there are activities, occupations and modes of expression that they cannot engage in until they are 21.
Or does it know but doesn’t want its readers to know?
The Times headline must have been labored over intensely to come up with a phrasing that didn’t read immediately as racially biased, since what is being described is racial bias, if standard “good” racial bias : “Democrats Aim for a Breakthrough for Black Women in the Senate.” The “breakthrough” is electing black women rather than white women or men, meaning that the party is declaring a preference for candidates based on gender and color. Funny, that was called bigotry when I was a lad. But black women are better than white women or any kind of man. Or they deserve success and power more. Or something: I better read my DEI manual again.
But never mind: it was the beginning of the article that struck me like a John Wayne punch in the jaw:
Carol Moseley Braun, one of only two Black women to have been elected to the Senate in U.S. history, was in Paris on Wednesday when she was informed that another Black woman, Angela Alsobrooks, had won the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Maryland.
“Praise the Lord,” she said with relief and surprise. “That’s wonderful.”
Ah, Carol Moseley Braun! (That’s her above.)The first, “historic” black female Senator was, not to beat around the bush, a serial crook, protected by the corrupt Democratic establishment under Bill Clinton, and now by the New York Times, because anything that undermines the DEI, “good discrimination” narrative isn’t news “fit to print,” or in this instance, history fit to print.
A House Oversight Committee meeting was pondering whether Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), responded to a question from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” Stay classy, MTG! (In truth, MTG has never been classy). “That is absolutely unacceptable,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interjected, proving that she’s not wrong all the time. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”
Greene then turned her wit, such as it is, on AOC, asking, “Are your feelings hurt?” “Oh, girl? Baby girl,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, trying hard to sink to the ridiculous Republican’s level, “Don’t even play.” Then Greene asked Ocasio-Cortez, “Why don’t you debate me?,” and AOC snapped back, “it’s pretty self-evident.”
I wonder what she was referring to? Jean Kerr once wrote that it was folly to argue with a six-year-old because you would inevitably start sounding like one.
“You don’t have enough intelligence,” shot back Greene, eschewing the more sophisticated, “I’m rubber and you’re glue” bon mot.
We just have to stop electing narrow, single-minded, critical thinking-challenged people to Congress. A basic understanding of the law and rudimentary knowledge of American history would also be nice, but that might be asking too much.
Falling neatly into the net the Biden administration and its prosecutor lackeys have set up for the gullible and easily misled, Sen. Lankford told The Hill that the trial of former President Donald Trump for falsifying business records (you could be excused for thinking it was a sex crime based on the accounts being broadcast on cable news channels like CNN and MSNBC) has been “painful and salacious.” Lankford said, “It reminds me of the Clinton administration and all the conversations that were happening around that time period with Ken Starr and all the things that came out.”
Why would that be? Because both Clinton and Trump are men? Politicians? They both have arms, legs and a head? There is no substantive parallel between the two situations or cases. Trump is being tried under a criminal statute that has nothing to do with sex. Clinton wasn’t tried at all, he was President when the conduct at issue in his impeachment occured, and the Lewinsky scandal proved that he engaged in perjury, lying under oath in a court room proceeding while he was President. Clinton also violated the sexual harassment law he had previously signed while being fawned over by feminists. Bagging female interns when you are President of the United States is an extreme example of abusing a power disparity for sex. Then Clinton, also while President, lied about his conduct and used subordinates to cover up his mess.
“My working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he’s not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.”
—Law professor/”Fiercely neutral” blogress Ann Althouse, characterizing President Biden’s contradictory and cynical treatment of Israel after he announced that the U.S. will withhold critical arms support for the attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah despite previously agreeing that Hamas had to be destroyed.
Ann adds, “But I suspect he’s too far gone to give us that.”
I was pondering how to frame a post about Biden’s craven perfidy regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict, as he literally tries to take both sides at once in order to avoid rejection by the Democratic Party’s pro-terrorism bloc, which has turned out to be a lot bigger than even critics suspected. Then I read Ann’s post highlighting Jon Podhoretz’s article for Commentary, “Biden’s Shameful Betrayal.” (Full disclosure:I know Jon, and like him: he was a member of my theater company’s board until he moved out of the District.) I don’t think Althouse has been red-pilled exactly—I’ll still lay odds that she ends up voting for Biden—but she seems genuinely disgusted by the age-addled President’s latest example of fecklessness and irresponsible leadership, as should we all.
“I mispoke and I regret it,” was the serial head-exploding Democratic governor of New York’s attempt at backtracking after she claimed, during a speech at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, “Right now we have, you know, young black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word “computer” is. They don’t know. They don’t know these things.”
“Of course black children in the Bronx know what computers are — the problem is that they too often lack access to the technology needed to get on track to high-paying jobs in emerging industries like AI,” Hochul said in her desperate mea culpa. “That’s why I’ve been focused on increasing economic opportunity since Day One of my Administration.”
If it’s really “Of course,” Governor, then why did you say what you said? And emphasize it three times?
Hochul’s scripted smear of the black children in her state triggered instant, if in some cases restrained, condemnation from her own party. “I’m deeply troubled by the recent statements made by Governor Kathy Hochul,” wrote New York State Assembly Member John Zaccaro Jr.in a statement. “The underlying perception conveyed about Black and brown children from the Bronx is not only disheartening but also deeply concerning.” Assembly Member Karines Reyes tweeted that she was “deeply disturbed” by Hochul’s remarks and “the underlying perception that she has of Black & brown children from the BX” because “Our children are bright, brilliant, extremely capable, and more than deserving of any opportunities that are extended to other kids,” Reyes wrote. “Do better.” Assembly Member Amanda Septimo called Hochul’s comments “harmful, deeply misinformed, and genuinely appalling,” adding that the Governor was “repeating harmful stereotypes.” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie described Hochul’s remarks as “inartful and hurtful.”
It’s amazing what a flat learning curve ideologues have.
Certain laws of economics are immutable: if someone’s skills and the value of their labor are not worth the amount they demand in compensation for it, then eventually no one will be willing to hire them. Way back in my foggy history, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged me with examining just this issue in my role as head of the National Chamber Foundation, the Chambers public policy research arm. I hired an independent economist to examine the issue, and he concluded that indeed, raising the minimum wage cost the most vulnerable American workers jobs every…single…time. He also explained that the political pressure for raising the minimum wage came from unions, which used a ride in the bottom wages as justification for demanding higher wages in their definitely un-minimum wage compensated fields. Unfortunately for me, my scholar, being independent, also disputed the Chamber’s position that minimum wage increases were automatically inflationary across the board. The President of the Chamber had my foundation’s study pulled out by a Democratic Party minimum wage hike advocate and used to refuse his position on a Sunday morning public affairs show. (My ultimate boss had neglected to read the document.) This, as you might imagine, did not help my status in the organization.
If anything, the advances in technology have made that old study at NCF more accurate than ever. Never mind, though: 21st Century progressives seem to care about virtue-signalling and fealty to socialist cant more than actual results or, to put it another way, reality. Naturally California, one of our extreme leftist kamikaze states, arguably the most reckless one, has adopted this attitude. And thus it came to pass that last fall, Governor Newsom signed into law a $20 an hour minimum wage hike on the fast food sector for the “benefit” of fast food workers, even as the segment of the public that most often consume fast food has been slammed by inflation and higher food prices particularly.
Everything we have learned about minimum wage hikes indicated that this would be a disaster, but advocates of the move in the Democratic party pooh-poohed the objections as more proof that conservatives are cruel and greedy. Do these people ever get tired of being embarrassingly, absurdly wrong? As a Washington Times headline put it, “Fast food chains find a way around $20 minimum wage: Get rid of the workers.”
“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessonslearned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”
I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.
Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.
But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.
Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.
Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.
This is probably too trivial an episode, but you never know. What might it take to cause a tunnel-visioned, propaganda-marinated, Trump-Deranged, ethically-stunted Democrat or progressive to slap himself,herself or whateverself briskly in the forehead and say, “What the hell? Why have I been supporting these people? They are corrupt and embarrassing!”
On April 17, our President informed a shocked nation that he thinks his uncle was eaten by cannibals. The purpose of his rambling discourse was, of course, the evilness of Donald Trump, as Biden repeated the now Axis-enshrined claim that as President, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 because the U.S. soldiers buried there were “losers” and “suckers.”
I have long thought Joe Biden was an idiot, even before he started losing brain cells like a scalp shed dandruff, and the complete fecklessness of the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has been brain-blowing for quite awhile as well. This sequence, however, is signature significance for an administration without any internal logic or ethical compass at all:
1. Hamas (a.k.a. the government of Gaza) launches a brutal sneak attack on civilians in Israel, raping women, killing babies, and taking hostages. The U.S. condemns the attack and proclaims its full support of Israel.
2. Israel, appropriately and necessarily, declares war on Hamas (and therefore Gaza), vowing that it will not permit the terrorist organization to exist literally next-door. The U.S. provides economic aid and weapons to the effort.
3. Israel’s assault kills Gazans as well as Hamas fighters, which is how Hamas intends it, because the Hamas tunnels containing war material and fighters is deliberately positioned under schools, hospitals and other structures that turn Gazans into human shields.
