A Test

Recall the false alarm about an inbound ICBM that a functionary of the Hawaii State government apparatus triggered last weekend.  I’m not interested, here, in how the false alarm got triggered in the first place, or why it took so long—38 minutes—to send out a false alarm notice, or why the State apparently chose to not even consider sending out an All Clear notice and figure out the false alarm aspects later.  There’s another question that seems to be getting ignored.

The mistaken alarm presented the citizens of the State and all of the State and local jurisdictions with a live, real-world, 38-minute test of the citizens’ and all of the State and local jurisdictions’ training to date and real-world responses to the situation of an inbound missile.  There was little more than citizen panic for those 38 minutes and little visible response by any jurisdiction within the State to help its citizens get to shelters or even to prepare or open any extant shelters.

At every level of responsibility within Hawaii, the State failed miserably its Operational Readiness Inspection.  What will Hawaii do about that?

The Rogue EPA

Glider trucks are freight-hauling trucks with used, rebuilt engines and drive trains installed in new cab-chassis.  Then-President Barack Obama’s (D) EPA, led by the paragon of green envy virtue, Gina McCarthy, decided that these used trucks actually were new trucks and held them required to meet that EPA’s emissions standards for new trucks.  After all, the Environmental Protection Act exempted used trucks from those standards, and the Obama crowd and its cronies like Volvo didn’t like that.

In late 2017, in order to prove the legitimacy of the claim, some holdover folks of the EPA ran a test on a couple of glider trucks and found them to meet/exceed EPA standards for new truck emissions.

So, shut up.

No.

Staff at EPA headquarters told [Steve Milloy, the author of the piece at the link] that administrator Scott Pruitt had no knowledge of these tests and never authorized them. The renegade report that the tests produced wasn’t peer-reviewed, as is customary. It also wasn’t printed on official EPA letterhead or assigned an internal EPA document number. It is not even available on the EPA lab’s website. Yet it mysteriously found its way into the hands of glider opponents at the early December public hearing on the proposed rollback.

The current budget request for the EPA contains a payroll budget level that’s consistent with a 47% reduction in EPA employees.  That reduction is clearly justified.

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

President Donald Trump has moved to fix or withdraw from ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Executive Agreement with Iran, cosigned by the leaders of a number of European nations, covering Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Folks can argue that this step has taken too long (and the terms of Obama’s EA have not been fixed, yet, nor have we canceled it; the deadline for that is next May), and I’m among the impatient.  However, the delay isn’t all bad (so far), since discussions of the Agreement, both public and behind the scenes (I assume), over the course of this delay have made the problems with it plainly evident, and the other parties to the deal no longer have excuses—they’ve have plenty of time to make their positions plain.

And the European parties are doing so.

European leaders have pushed back against major revisions. That, they fear, could give Tehran an excuse to walk away from the deal entirely, accelerating Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon.

This is naïve.  Accelerated or only moderately accelerated, Iran will get nuclear weapons in the current circumstance.  That would be the true disaster, since Iran has sworn to destroy Israel, and Iran will happily sell (or give) nuclear weapons to its client terrorist network entities for the latter’s use in Europe, the US, and elsewhere around the world.

Projection

Kentucky has decided to take advantage of new Federal Medicaid rules and add a work requirement to those receiving Medicaid payments in order for them to be eligible for continued payments.  Recipients in the typical working age range of 19-64 must do 80 hours—two weeks—of what the State terms “community engagement.”  There are, of course, exceptions for those who cannot work.

As Kentucky’s governor Matt Bevin (R) noted in his tweet about his decision to approve the new rule,

There is dignity associated with earning the value of something that you receive. The vast majority of men and women, able-bodied men and women … they want the dignity associated with being able to earn and have engagement.

Progressive-Democrats are in an uproar over the requirement that people actually work in order to receive government largesse.

Congressman John Yarmuth [D, KY] call[ed] it a “dangerous and irresponsible” decision that will lead to the “financial ruin” for thousands of families that reside in Kentucky.

Of course.  Just like adding a work requirement in the Federal government’s reform of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (later replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which continued the work requirement—until then-President Barack Obama (D) waived the work requirement) dangerously and irresponsibly led to financial ruin for all those hundreds of thousands of families.  Oh, wait—that actually led to the adults in those families not only going to work, but to those families’ increased prosperity, since their earned income was greater than their AFDC/TANF payments.

The Progressive-Democrat is projecting.

 

*The waiver led to an explosion of families on TANF and their increased poverty, thus providing an actual experiment on the outcome of a work requirement.

A Justice Misunderstands

The Supreme Court heard arguments the other day on an Ohio voter registration law.  That law removes voters from the roll if they haven’t voted over a two-year period and don’t respond to a follow-up notice from Ohio’s Secretary of State.

It’s a partisan case from the Left’s perspective: those opposing the law argue, with some justification, that those who live in urban regions (and who happen to vote Democratic) relocate more frequently than do those who live in the ‘burbs and out in the country (and who happen to vote Republican).  This would seem to put Democrats at a disadvantage in elections since they’re more likely to have not voted over a two-year period and not responded to the follow-up notice.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor put the thing nakedly: Ohio’s law

results in disenfranchising disproportionately certain cities where large groups of minorities live, where large groups of homeless people live

and, as the WSJ added,

including people who can’t make it to the polls because of the long hours they work.

The one is at best a misunderstanding, albeit entirely consistent with the Left’s view that responsibility lies with Government and not with the individual.  The other is just nonsense.

Urbanites may well have a higher turnover rate than suburbanites and [farmers], but nothing stops those who leave from registering to vote in their new jurisdiction, and nothing stops those arriving as “replacements” for the departed from registering in the current jurisdiction.  Turnover has nothing to do with it, skin color (I won’t address ethnicity; we’re all Americans in the voting booth) has nothing to do with it, homelessness has nothing to do with it (although this group has a beef in terms of demonstrating their residency so they can register).

The other is wholly irrelevant: Ohio has an extensive early voting time frame; there are lots of opportunities for those with long hours to go vote.