Tag Archives: #Democrisy

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#Climapocracy! Pete Buttigieg wants us all to reduce our carbon emissions, but he takes a jet every 3½ days

I’m pretty sure that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg would want to reconsider his tweet, but, not to worry, I’ve got the screen capture!

The math is simple: December 14th, when he tweeted his original, is the 348th day of the year, and the Secretary told us that this was his 99th flight of the year. 348 ÷ 99 = 3.5151 repeating, 3.52 a close enough approximation. Every 3½ days the Secretary of Transportation has been flying off to somewhere!

From The Washington Post:

“Inevitably, every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge it or not,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Climate 202. “So I think that’s absolutely part of our mandate and part of our set of responsibilities as a department.”

It would seem that, in Mr Buttigieg’s 99 decisions to go leaving on a jet plane, he has taken 99 decisions to spew more CO2 into the atmosphere! Were all of those 99 trips necessary? Has he never asked himself, “Could I do this by videoconference?”

Mr Buttigieg said, at the COP26 conference:

Well, thank you very much and thanks to the U.K. for hosting us. Let me also note, with this audience, how much pleasure I take in the knowledge that the aircraft that brought me to the U.K. returned back to the States full of international travelers, and we’re delighted at that news.

We’re honored to be here with our fellow founding members of the International Aviation Climate Coalition demonstrating that we hear the voices of our citizens, especially our courageous young citizens, who are demanding similar courage on our part, knowing that their lives will be defined by our decisions. And that means not only hearing them but acting, especially on the hard things. And aviation is a sector that is famously considered hard to abate which I think in a less urgent moment, as with maritime, might have meant that it would be on down the list of priorities. But at a moment like this, it also equates to have to abate – and that’s what we’re doing.

Aviation is so central to the fabric of our global economy and our global community. And of course, it’s how so many of us got here this week. And I can tell you as a former mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S., it’s not only important for our global metro centers, but for communities in every part of every country.

And as we know it’s a significant contributor to climate change and without dramatic, urgent action, there will be substantial additional growth in emissions over the next 30 years.

So, it falls to us to find ways to limit those emissions urgently. And the question has become: will we act quickly enough to protect our countries and to seize the economic potential that sustainable aviation represents?

The reality is that the timelines are not being dictated by conferences or by congresses; they’re being set by the laws of physics. And the other timeline that is so important is the engineering that it takes to design, test, produce, and deploy lower carbon aircraft.

But we can control our response, and with that we can shape our collective future.

Yeah, I get it: Mr Buttigieg is a very high-ranking American government official, and there will be some required travel, travel to places he can’t get on his bicycle or an Elon Musk produced Tesla.

But 99 plane rides in less than a year?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we plebeians might take the Patricians more seriously when they tell us we must reduce our CO2 emissions if they showed us, by deeds, that they take their own words seriously.

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A Democrat says the quiet part out loud Former Representative Ben Chandler admitted that he tried to confuse voters about his own positions

Albert Benjamin Chandler III, a Democrat, and the grandson of former Governor, Senator and Commissioner of Baseball A B “Happy” Chandler, won a special election in 2004 for the Sixth District congressional seat, and was re-elected in 2006, 2008 and 2010. In 2012, he was defeated by Republican Andy Barr, who continues to hold the seat today.

An article on the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website references Mr Chandler and his electoral history.

‘All politics is national’: How Kentucky’s congressional districts have slid off the map

by David Catanese | Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 10:27 AM EDT

WASHINGTON Four years ago, Andy Barr had a real race on his hands.

An outside Republican group poured more than $3.5 million into Lexington’s 6th Congressional District to counter the nationally recruited Amy McGrath’s $8 million warchest.

Barr survived the rough and expensive environment, but only by 3 percentage points.

Now his former battleground seat in the heart of Kentucky’s commonwealth looks downright hospitable, if not sleepy.

The article continues to tell readers that every congressional district in Kentucky has a party favorability rating in double digits, five for Republicans, and one, in Louisville, for Democrats. Mr Barr’s district actually has the smallest partisan advantage, at 13%.

The Bluegrass State was the friendliest in the South for Democrats, with Democrats winning most gubernatorial races, and controlling the state House of Representatives up until the 2016 elections. But it was tough going for Mr Chandler in the Sixth District, and he told the reporter how he held on for as long as he did:

Lexington’s 6th Congressional District used to fall in the competitive category when Chandler held the seat for four terms. But Chandler, now the CEO of The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, says he had to practice the “politics of confusion” in order to survive in a place where most identified as conservative.

“I had to confuse my constituents so they couldn’t tell whether I was a liberal or a conservative or a moderate,” he said, noting that endeavor became more difficult as data showed him that an increasing amount of his constituents were primarily depending on conservative media outlets like Fox News, which blared narratives that tarred his entire party with the same broad brush. “When that’s the case and you’re a Democrat, you clearly are looking at a hell of an uphill battle.”

Translation: Mr Chandler had to lie to the voters to win the races he did.

Mr Chandler lost to Mr Barr in the 2012 elections, but Democrats in the Bluegrass State held on to a majority in the state House of Representatives until the 2016 contests. The Sixth District, which includes more liberal Lexington, is Kentucky’s second most Democratic district, and, as the cited article pointed out, Amy McGrath Henderson, who wasn’t an incumbent, ran a competitive race against Mr Barr in 2018. Is it possible, just possible, that Mr Chandler lost in 2012 at least in part because the voters in the district were not as confused about him as he thought he could make them? Given that Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives following both the 2000 and 2010 elections, it wasn’t as though Republicans could gerrymander the district against them.

Mrs Henderson tried to confuse the voters as well, spending a clear pile of money — $8,274,396 to Mr Barr’s $5,580,477 — on mailings and television ads telling us how moderate and patriotic she was. However, she attended a fund raiser in Massachusetts and said, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky.”

There’s a simple truth here: while Mr Chandler and Mrs Henderson both tried to fool the voters of the Sixth District, Mr Barr has not, because the voters in the Sixth more closely match conservative Republican principles.

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Democrisy: It seems that Democrats in government don’t believe the rules they set for others apply to themselves

It was mostly an internet meme, circulating through the evil reich-wing communities, but, eventually, the credentialed media had to take notice; the election being over, it wasn’t as harmful to their causes anyway.

Politicians across U.S. eat own words after dining out, taking trips

by Juliet Williams, Associated Press | December 3, 2020 | 7:00 AM EST

SAN FRANCISCO — Their messaging has been clear: wear a mask; stay 6 feet apart; and, most importantly, stay home!

But their actions aren’t living up to the rhetoric, creating a real political problem for some of the most vocal leaders in California’s fight to contain the coronavirus.

First came Gov. Gavin Newsom, who won plaudits for issuing the first statewide stay-at-home order in the U.S. back in March. He broke the state rules when he and his wife were caught dining with 10 others at the posh French Laundry restaurant in Napa in early November with lobbyists and others from numerous different households, sitting close together, mask-less.

San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, was at the same $350-a-plate restaurant a day later, dining with a San Francisco socialite and six others. Breed has also won accolades for imposing some of the strictest rules in California, keeping coronavirus rates relatively low. Her spokespeople haven’t responded to queries about how many households were there — state rules cap those at three. Her spokesman rubbed salt in the wound by saying she has been trying to support local restaurants. The French Laundry is 60 miles out of town.

The Associated Press article makes it sound like Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) was the first, but he wasn’t. Newsweek posted an article listing some of the others:

  • Mayor Steve Adler (D-Austin)
  • Governor Kevin Stitt (R-OK)
  • Mayor Michael Hancock (D-Denver)
  • Mayor Muriel Bowser (D-Washington DC)
  • Mayor Sam Liccardo (D-San José)
  • Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-Chicago)

The article also noted that Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) was preparing to break his own rules, but when it became public in advance, he cancelled his plans due to the political backlash.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was caught on tape going to a private hair salon, for which the lovely Mrs Pelosi did not apologize, but simply claimed that she’d been set up by an evil reich-wing activist.

Of course, the people on the list are all over very large areas. I’m guessing that a lot of smaller city mayors and city councilmen, etc, have also violated the rules, but they aren’t important enough to have made the national news.

There is one Republican on the list, but Newsweek also stated that:

Republican governors have faced fewer accusations, largely because they have not implemented as many of the restrictions that public health experts have called for.

Translation: they have had more respect for our constitutional rights.

In his concurring opinion in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote:

Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis. At a minimum, that Amendment prohibits government officials from treating religious exercises worse than comparable secular activities, unless they are pursuing a compelling interest and using the least restrictive means available. Yet recently, during the COVID pandemic, certain States seem to have ignored these long-settled principles. . . . .

What could justify so radical a departure from the First Amendment’s terms and long-settled rules about its application? Our colleagues offer two possible answers. Initially, some point to a solo concurrence in South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, in which the Chief Justice expressed willingness to defer to executive orders in the pandemic’s early stages based on the newness of the emergency and how little was then known about the disease. At that time, COVID had been with us, in earnest, for just three months. Now, as we round out 2020 and face the prospect of entering a second calendar year living in the pandemic’s shadow, that rationale has expired according to its own terms. Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical. Rather than apply a nonbinding and expired concurrence from South Bay, courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause. . . . .

In the end, I can only surmise that much of the answer lies in a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis. But if that impulse may be understandable or even admirable in other circumstances, we may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do.

COVID-19 is serious, a highly contagious disease that can be, and is, fatal, though in only about 1% of the cases. Hospitalization rates are much higher than that.

But the damage being done to our constitutional rights is far, far greater. The precedent being set, that government can set down rules which would otherwise be unconstitutional because of some ’emergency’ simply leaves it to elected officials to decide just what emergencies outweigh our constitutional rights. Many are already wanting to abridge our constitutional rights under the Second Amendment because some bad people are wrongly using firearms. The New York Times published an OpEd by Parker Malloy, himself a male who thinks he is female, claiming that “Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.” There will always be such very good reasons to suspend or restrict our constitutional rights, when those rights are left for other people to decide. If the left can somehow ban ‘hate speech,’ what other speech can they ban? The McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act actually sought to ban political speech in favor of one candidate or another prior to an election, because, well just because.

Brave men fought, and died, for our rights. At least six of my known ancestors fought in our Revolution, for the rights they were denied by King George and his Parliament. At least twenty-one of my known ancestors came to these shores, risking their lives on the open ocean in small wooden ships, for the right to worship God as they chose, and not be oppressed by King James and King Charles for not being Anglicans. Can I really support governors restricting our freedom of religion over a disease far less deadly than an ocean voyage to an untamed continent in the 1620s and 1630s?[1]Fifty-one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower either died at sea or in that first New England winter and spring.

Our great country was founded in danger, by people fleeing tyranny in England, and by brave men and women who risked their lives on the frontier, and in war, yet our political leaders today, primarily but not exclusively Democrats, would have us quaking in fear and trashing the freedoms and liberties for which our ancestors fought and died. We dishonor our ancestors when we allow their sacrifices to be wasted.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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↑1 Fifty-one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower either died at sea or in that first New England winter and spring.