Month: January 2015

I was micro-aggressed and lived to tell of it!

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Maybe I’m old, not hip or just not a politically correct liberal, but I first heard the word “micro-aggression” a couple months ago when my husband came home from a meeting with some college students and asked if I had ever heard the term.  He hadn’t either until then, and got quite a conservative chuckle out of it.  Since then, we have heard it bantered about quite a lot by the PC crowd.  Basically, any affront to your gentle liberal sensibilities by another (usually a dolt or a conservative) is an act of micro-aggression.  For example, the University President who said that “all lives matter” instead of the politically correct “black lives matter” committed a micro-aggression against people of color.  And since aggressions, large or small, are taboo, and apparently the First Amendment (or is it the First Commandment?) has been reinterpreted to mean that “You shall not be offended/annoyed/slighted or get your panties in a twist, ever, by anybody”, micro-aggressions are NOT COOL.

So last week, I was in the Green Room before an appearance on the Thom Hartmann Show (a delightful, however misguided leftie who has a radio show and a TV show on the RT – Russia Today – network. I won’t be offended if you have never heard of it, although it does have a small cult following by certain members of the US Military who are tasked with monitoring what the crazies do and say.)  My co-conservative panelist was there, as were his daughter, a friend and two RT employees.  The RT folks (we didn’t know them) were talking about how awful, of course, American Sniper was and the US Military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, blah, blah, blah.  You know, . . .  the usual.

The conservative guest politely chimed in with his thoughts about the US Military (worthy of support and thanks) and the wars in general (we can’t really pass judgment unless we were there, etc.)  Well, the liberals about passed out!  The discussion got a little heated, but Mr. Conservative was enjoying it – that IS what we go on Thom Hartmann to do.  After a few minutes of slightly raised voices and the appearance of some lefty reinforcements, the show’s producer came in and told the RT folks to settle down.  They all left in a huff, and we thought, “That was fun!”  A good warm up for the Lone LIberal Rumble to come.

Well. the producer of the show came back in and wanted to know “how that all started.”  He was very upset that RT employees would attack Thom’s guests like that.  “You mean, they committed a micro-aggression on us?” I asked.

“Yes! Good use of the liberal term, Kris!”  I was told.  The other conservative and I laughed – we were fine, we assured him.

“I didn’t know that conservatives COULD be victims of a micro-aggression,” I replied, “I thought we could only be the perpetrators.”

While I agree that generally it is a bad idea to “verbally attack” guests of a TV show in the Green Room, neither I nor the other conservative felt attacked. We thought we were having a voluntary conversation with people who held different opinions.  I thought it was pretty tacky of them to huff off when they clearly were not going to change our minds, but hey, its a free country.  We go on that show – on that Network – because we believe that even the most committed liberals can benefit from at least hearing what others think.  If we didn’t, we would sit at home and talk only to our like-minded friends.

So the good news is . . . I survived my first micro-aggression!  I’m sure it won’t be my last.

Paid leave for all – will leave us paying the price

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It is not a shock that the left is finally pushing for mandatory paid leave.   Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in the 90s and we all knew it wouldn’t take long for the economically uneducated liberals to figure out that unpaid leave is not really valuable if you can’t afford to not get paid.

So now Obama comes out with this great idea – mandating paid leave for maternity and sick leave.   Great!  Wonderful!  How right and just and fair!  Sure, sounds great, but it won’t work in the “real world” i.e. private sector. Of course, the intelligentsia leftists, who have never owned or run a business (Obama), have no perspective on the downside.

Now before I upset many friends and neighbors, let me say that I was, at one time, a “government” worker – employed by the federal government in an executive agency.  Yes, I was a political appointee, but I still got to see how the agency works . . . . so very slowly.

Because you see, mandating this for federal workers will not have the same impact as mandating it on the private sector.  That is because the federal government is extremely inefficient.  If someone in your office is out on paid leave . . . well, the work will wait until they return.  No big hurry, no rush.  I love to tell the story of how on my first week at DOJ, I was given an assignment to reply to questions from a Senator to the Attorney General.  I drafted the answers and put them in a nice envelop labeled “Exec Sec” so that they could be reviewed and approved (Executive Secretary, but I never did figure out who or what that really was).  Seven months later, during my last week employed by DOJ, I received a nice envelop on my desk from the mysterious Exec Sec.  In it were the answers I had drafted months ago, with a polite note asking me to please review and approve the enclosed so that they could be delivered to Capitol HIll.  WHAT???  Where had they been for all this time?  Was Exec Sec out on paid or unpaid leave?  Did no one, save the Senator, care about the timing of the reply.  I felt like a failure – but no one else at DOJ shared my view.  “Don’t sweat it,” I was told, “that’s just the way things are done . . . it takes a while for these things to make their way around all the offices that have to sign onto something.”  No rush, no worries.

In addition, Federal Government Departments hire as many people as the funding will allow.  If they don’t spend it – their yearly appropriation, they will “lose” it, and future increases as well.  It a perverse system, unless of course, your running it or employed by it.

But in the private sector, employers hire only the employees they need, and many times fewer than the need.  If an employee is not there, the work either doesn’t get done, resulting in loss of earnings to the business or the co-workers have to pick up the slack.  For example, if your favorite waitress is out on leave, will the restaurant pay someone else to fill in, or will service be slower?  If they are forced to pay the employee who is not working, they will not have the money to pay someone else to take her place, and you will suffer, and the servers who do show up will resent the one on paid leave for making them do twice the work for the same money.

But Obama and his ilk don’t get this, don’t want to and don’t really care if employers are hurt by it.  They think a loss of business earnings just means less profit for the evil business owners.  But it really means higher prices for you and me, poorer service,  and could even lead to [gasp] discrimination against women of child-bearing age, the obese or sickly.  No business will hire anyone they think will have higher than average sick leave needs.

Ignorance is not bliss . . . and mandated paid leave is a bad idea whose time has not come.

Double Standards – Muslim beliefs/practices trump U.S. Military

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As Chris Plante likes to say, “If the left did not have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”

The AP reports today that,  “A military judge ordered officials at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday to stop using female guards to move the five defendants in the Sept. 11 case to court and back and to meetings with their lawyers. The ruling by Army Col. James Pohl addresses a dispute that has threatened to disrupt proceedings in the case, which is in the pretrial phase. Defendants have been refusing to meet with defense lawyers, arguing that any physical contact with a woman not related to them violates their Muslim beliefs.”

Huh?  Since when does the US of A change its policies based on the religious beliefs of [suspected] non-citizen criminals, or even its own citizens?

Just ask any of the Christian bakers, florists, or photographers whether their religious beliefs take precedence over the desires of homosexual patrons who have sued to force these Christians to de facto participate in their same-sex marriage ceremonies?  Ha!  Not quite.  [And let’s not forget that in each of these cases, the business owners have gladly served customers of all faiths, races and sexual orientations in non-wedding situations.  It is only providing services directly tied to “marriage ceremonies” that have caused objections.]

So how is it that a military judge sides with suspected terrorists over the U. S. Military?  Why is it that the military needs to reassign its soldiers so as not to violate the beliefs of radical Islamists?

Class?  Class?  Anyone?  Anyone?