Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

SUBSCRIPTION DRIVE – THREE MORE DAYS

Urgent Agenda will soon begin its 14th year.  It is a 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year operation.  We depend on subscriptions and donations to keep going.  We are entering the most important mid-term election campaign in recent memory, and we believe our service will continue to be valuable to readers.

Subscribers and donators not only support our work, they participate in our Forum, which contains their posts and replies to their posts.   Subscribers and donators write on any subject they wish.  The Forum is emailed once a week. 

We do hope you join us.  To do so, simply go to SUBSCRIPTIONS, in the right-hand column opposite these words.  You can use PayPal, or SENDINC, which is a reader favorite for its security and simplicity.  Or, should you wish to use a traditional paper check, please send me an email at
comments@urgentagenda.com, and I'll provide an address.  Subscriptions are $48 a year, or $26 for six months.

Welcome to Urgent Agenda.

OCTOBER 1,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

MORE WOKENESS – FROM CAMPUS REFORM:   Indiana University announced recently its new $30 million “Diversity Hiring Initiative," a multi-year fund to accelerate the hiring of “professors from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.”  Tuition and fees for an in-state student at IU’s main campus is $11,332 a year, meaning that $30 million dollars could cover one year's expenses for over 2,600 Indiana students.  President Pamela Whitten, who made the details public in an email obtained by Campus Reform, boasted September 21 that the fund will “support the academic needs” of the university in a press release.  “Using reallocated funds from non-academic services, as well as external gifts, new faculty positions will be added,” Whitten explained in the university statement.  The press release also quoted W. Quinn Buckner, chair of the IU Board of Trustees.  "Our collective commitment to a more diverse faculty will have a positive impact on our university, as well as on our state and beyond," Buckner said.  Many IU students, however, are not as ecstatic about the program as the president and board of trustees chair.  In statement to Campus Reform, the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter said they are “disappointed” with IU and hope they “reverse course.”  “YAF at IU is disappointed with the university’s decision to continue to use student fees and tuition for meaningless virtue signaling," the statement read. "Hiring faculty based on the color of their skin is an abysmal moral decision by IU and we hope they reverse course on this racist waste of money."  Of course, YAF will be called racist for its statement, and there will undoubtedly be cries to have it banned from campus.  But YAF is fundamentally right.  The new program will weaken the whole foundation of higher education, and turn it into an ethnic clearing house.   And the world ain't buying what the woke crowd is selling, something that is becoming increasingly clear.  And that can devastate our economy.

October 1, 2021       Permalink

A LECTURE FROM FRANCE – OVERNIGHT:  It's not often that I agree with a French view of the United States, but now is one of the rare times.  The French are becoming critical of our new, WOKE culture, and the French are right.  We should listen.  From Fox: 

Some prominent French figures, including President Emmanuel Macron, are rejecting "woke" ideology that has been imported from the United States amid a breakdown in relations between the two nations.

A cover story by Le Spectacle Du Monde, one of France's leading magazines, recently ran a piece titled "The Suicide of America" in which it blames the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan on a "woke dictatorship" and questioned whether the American "empire was collapsing," Zenger News reported.

The article also took American universities to task over alleged extremism and censorship on campuses. The story cited Yale University, where school officials urged students to reconsider Halloween costumes that might be racially insensitive.

Macron, who has been criticized by French progressives, told Elle Magazine this past summer that woke culture was "racializing" French society, Zenger reported.

"I see that our society is becoming progressively racialized," he said.

Several members of his government have also shared anti-woke views, including Elisabeth Moreno, the french French delegate minister for gender equality and diversity.

"The ‘woke’ culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France," she told Bloomberg News in May.

A panel at the year's "Tocqueville Conversations," near Normandy discussed the perceived decline of free speech and expression in the United States that some attribute to "woke" culture.

"Our mantra is that we should talk even if we strongly disagree. Nothing prevents you from talking and exchanging and dialoguing," Jean-Guillaume de Tocqueville, the descendant of 19th-century liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, told the news outlet. "The French Revolution was an event that led to a bloody civil war because the people who were not in agreement with the new ideas, the really revolutionary ideas, were just killed and beheaded. It was not a good way to debate."

The French criticism of the U.S. comes amid a fracture in American-French relations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to travel to France next week after Australia canceled a deal to purchase a French submarine in favor of creating a new Indo-Pacific security arrangement with Washington and the United Kingdom.

COMMENT:  Well said by our French colleagues.  The United Stastes is being smothered by woke culture, which is a modern form of thinking that mixes Marxism with McCarthyism, a rather toxic brew.  The wokesters believe they have the answer to every question, but they really don't have the answers to any question.  Look at the behavior of the woke crowd in Congress this week, taking a wrecking ball to anything they didn't like, and obstructing true and thoughtful bipartisan efforts.  We don't need the woke.  Go away.

October 1,  2021       Permalink

SEPTEMBER 30,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

SYMBOL OF OUR TIMES – FROM BIZPACREVIEW.COM:   Democrat-controlled Chicago has come up with at least a partial solution, albeit sad and weak, to the epidemic of deadly gun crime that turns almost every weekend into a municipal bloodbath.  Officials are installing 400-plus, wall-mounted bleeding control kits in nearly 300 public buildings in the Windy City as well as at medical clinics, senior facilities, and possibly subway stations and parks. The kits are evidently meant to be used as a stopgap measure before EMTs arrive to render treatment to victims. “Each of the kits contain enough supplies to treat eight victims, with tourniquets, gauze, shears, gloves and an instruction manual,” NBC Chicago reported about the initiative.  According to Rich Guidice, Chicago’s emergency management and communications (OEMC) executive director, “The box has eight tourniquets and also gauze, so it’s basically to stop the bleeding.”  “We’re living in different times. And we’re doing our best to adapt to the environment that we’re living in,” he added, describing the additional supplies as “just another layer of security and protection.”  Geez.  What can we say to this?  What can we really say?  What a comment on what this country is becoming. 

September 30, 2021       Permalink

THE TRAIN WRECK – OVERNIGHT:  The Democratic Party is hopelessly split, and one can only wonder why there is no talk of a new center-left party, which would certainly pick up significant support from the sane members of the electorate.  From Fox: 

Congressional Democrats Thursday night called off an effort to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill through the House after negotiations on their reconciliation bill stalled, leaving the two major pieces of President Biden's economic agenda in limbo. 

The failure to pass the infrastructure bill so far this week – and the failure to come to an agreement on what the reconciliation bill should look like – were major blows to congressional Democrats and the president. And they underscore both Democrats' razor-thin majorities in Congress and their internal divisions. 

But the two bills were not necessarily dead yet, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., continued to express optimism as she left the Capitol early Friday morning. 

"We're not trillions apart," she said at 12:01 a.m. "There'll be a vote today."

House progressives have for months said that they would not vote for the infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation bill is passed first through both chambers of Congress. But meanwhile, House moderates extracted a promise from Pelosi to bring up the infrastructure bill before the end of September in exchange for their votes for the budget resolution in August. 
Against a deadline

Slow negotiations, however, on the framework of the reconciliation package between moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and party leaders butted up against the deadline for the infrastructure vote. 

This created a situation in which progressives demanded immediate action on reconciliation in order for them to vote on infrastructure, and moderates simply demanded immediate action on infrastructure. 

Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and White House liaisons Susan Rice and Brian Deese tried until late Thursday night to reach a deal before House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced there would be no further votes for the evening. 

Shortly after that, Problem Solvers Caucus Chairman Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., walked briskly into Pelosi's office, holding a phone to his head and appearing displeased. Gottheimer was one of the infrastructure bill's biggest supporters in the House. 

He left the speaker's office a little over a half-hour later. Gottheimer declined to speak to reporters on both occasions. 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had said in a Thursday statement that an agreement was close. 
"A great deal of progress has been made this week, and we are closer to an agreement than ever. But we are not there yet, and so, we will need some additional time to finish the work, starting [Friday] morning first thing," Psaki said. 

COMMENT:  The party now is essentially controlled by the militant left.  They are fanatical and have no idea how government in a democracy works.  It is time to begin discussions about the formation of a new center-left party. 

September 30, 2021       Permalink