Category Archives: culture

Say they Did

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James Freeman, who does the Best of the Web column for The Wall Street Journal, has waxed optimistic about the Progressive-Democratic Party’s future, given a New York Times editorial he ran across over the past weekend.

It was a most pleasant surprise to see a weekend editorial in the New York Times of all places suggesting a step back from the progressive ledge. The Times is now urging Democrats to reconsider a number of the destructive ideas that party leaders embraced after reading about them in the New York Times. Let’s be optimistic and call this a great start if the newspaper wants to embark on an era of reform.

Per the Times, as Freeman quoted it:

First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr Biden out of the race. …
Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year—on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners—highlighted the problem…. [Elision in the original]
Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences—by race, gender, sexuality and religion—rather than our shared values.

Say Progressive-Democratic Party leadership and members do change how they talk about the issues us average Americans care about—which would include, for starters, actually talking about those issues. On what basis would we believe those persons have changed what they’d do were they restored to political power? The same persons who Freeman thinks should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age, and who he thinks should recognize that the party moved too far left, and who he says remain[] too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences would still be in place.

Why would any rational American believe these Wonders have suddenly shorn themselves of their most tenaciously held ideology?

Alternatively, consider these persons actually changing their core ideology. If they toss so readily and quickly that long-held central tenet in favor of a new central tenet, how could any rational American trust them not to toss equally readily and quickly their new central tenet in favor of yet another central tenet—or revert to that original, wholly divisive and otherwise dishonest centrality?

What’s really needed to restore us to a viable two-party political system is a wholly new and separate political party created out of whole cloth, difficult as that is to achieve—the last successful effort being the Republican Party in 1854. The Progressive-Democratic Party incumbents already have amply demonstrated their lack of trustworthiness.

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.

That Includes You, Mr Newsom

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom claims to be worried that Party is too judgmental and toxic and that We talk down to people. We talk past people.

Then he said this:

I mean, this idea that we can’t even have a conversation with the other side…or the notion we just have to continue to talk to ourselves or win the same damn echo chamber, these guys are crushing us[.]

These guys are crushing us. Not, “We need to converse/debate/argue/talk with folks about ideas that we think help all Americans.” It’s “We need to do better at beating the other side so we can win.”

Party will remain toxic to the American idea as long as its goal is wholly independent of working toward the national weal and wholly focused instead on doing down the other side.

A Gordian Knot Solution

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I have called, often, for the dissolution of the Department of Veterans Affairs on the basis of that agency’s, and now department’s, poor-to-nonexistent quality-level care for our nation’s veterans.

Now we get this. It’s from the end of the Biden administration, but this sort of thing is not unique to that one.

The inspector general report published Thursday confirms that a $2.9 billion supplemental request went unused because the agency failed to account for “prior-year recoveries” in its budget planning. Had the agency taken into account those recovered funds, the inspector general found, its projections “would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by year-end.”

And this, more generally:

The OIG review team found that Veteran’s Benefits Administration wasn’t consistently overspending in FY 2024 for either compensation and pension or readjustment benefits accounts, which were the subject of the budget request. “Realized prior-year recoveries,” which are “unspent deobligated funds,” weren’t included in the agency’s calculations, which contributed to the erroneous predictions.
“Had the realized prior-year recoveries been included in the calculations throughout the year, the monthly funding status reports would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by the end of the fiscal year,” the watchdog concluded.

Current VA Secretary Doug Collins has inherited this situation and the permeating VA internal culture; he has this:

It’s just a very, a department that is so bureaucratically bogged down that it has trouble doing its main mission, and that is taking care of veterans, and that’s why we’re actually working very hard to streamline processes, to get better help in place, and to have budgets and numbers that we can be accurate

To an extent, I disagree with Collins. It’s not worth the time, effort, money, or other resources to try to untangle this financial mess. It’s time for the Gordian Knot solution. Just get rid of the VA altogether, and convert the department’s current and putative future budgets to vouchers which our veterans can use to visit the doctors, clinics, and hospitals they choose and from which they’ll be able routinely to get timely care. Transfer the VA’s veteran housing mortgage facilities to HUD for execution.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

My Long-Standing Question

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Holman Jenkins opened his op-ed with this paragraph.

In a different political universe Elon Musk’s DOGE wouldn’t be needed. A competent media would be flogging the public sector to provide taxpayers with effective, cost-efficient service. Programs would be examined for their usefulness. It wouldn’t qualify as wanton cruelty if one were determined to be obsolete, as happens in the private sector every day.

I’ll leave aside Jenkins’ journalistic self-importance in presuming members of the journalism guild to be the ones to define “effective” or “cost-efficient.” I’m interested here in his reference to determined to be obsolete, as happens in the private sector every day. Would that he would apply that to his guild, and answer a question I’ve long asked.

1. ID of “anonymous” sources
2. Explanation of why [journalism] has walked away from journalistic standard of corroborating “anonymous” sources with at least two on the record sources
3. Explanation of why we readers should believe “anonymous” sources actually exist
4. On the premise that at least some of the “anonymous” sources do exist, explanation of why we should believe what the source is claiming, given his fundamental dishonesty as demonstrated by his leak, which came at least in violation of his terms of employment if not his oath of office
5. On claims that the leaker is actually a whistle-blower, explanation of why proof was withheld from readers that he exhausted all of his whistle-blower channels before he leaked
6. Regarding 5 above, provision of that proof
7. Identification of the whistle blower, since he needs no anonymity; whistle-blower laws protect him

To which I add, most importantly, given Item 2 above, what publicly accessible, concretely measurable standard of journalistic integrity do today’s editors and news writers use?