Category Archives: morality

Fear-Mongering Lies

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The editors at The Wall Street Journal opined about the CBO joining the Left’s scaremongering regarding those disastrous cuts to Medicaid that the Evil Republicans are bent on inflicting. The dishonesty is much broader than that of the CBO, though. The lede image illustrates the magnitude and the breadth and depth of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s participation in the lie.

Here are some facts buried by the CBO in its report, but still there in its Black Letter Report. CBO isn’t the only crowd focusing on the top number, that some 10.9 million folks would lose Medicaid coverage under the House Republican reconciliation bill.

  • 2 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid would lose coverage owing to the bill’s work requirements
  • 700,000 would lose coverage through the bill’s more frequent Medicaid eligibility verification requirements
  • 4 million undocumented migrants would lose coverage
  • 1 million non-permanent immigrants and asylum seekers would lose Obamacare subsidies

That’s 8.3 million of those 10.9 million who would lose coverage. Those millions consist of folks who should be working rather than shirking and freeloading, others who are not entitled to coverage due to their status as illegal aliens, their status as non-citizens and so not entitled to subsidies, or their lack of eligibility because they’ve moved out of state, or their incomes have increased sufficiently.

Those remaining 2.6 million might or might not still be eligible for coverage, and if so, they’ll easily be covered by their States through the savings in Medicaid outlays no longer being sent to those 8.3 million.

Hospitals won’t close, unless a State chooses to cut them off from Medicaid outlays out of a politician snit, and the only folks who would die would be those dumped onto the street by a State’s decision to close those hospitals.

Of course House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) and his supporters know these things full well. As highly talented and thoroughly educated politicians, they are, of course, entirely literate and responsible politicians that they also are, they’ve read the entire CBO report.

Instead, they illustrate why our nation cannot have nice things were they to return to political power.

It’s Not Only That

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote, regarding who or what is responsible for safeguarding our rights and liberties,

the security of our rights depends on ourselves. When one considers what we hold self-evident—that government doesn’t possess the power to grant or deny our inherent and unalienable natural rights—we find that all we got from Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues was a federal government that has rarely upheld the terms of our social contract and poses the greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity.

That’s not all we got from Franklin, though. The letter writer missed Franklin’s critical criterion, included in his 17 April 1787 letter to the Abbes Chalut and Arnaud, that defines “ourselves:”

Let me add, that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

Our pursuit of being virtuous, though—especially today—requires a complete revamp of our education system to emphasize performance, merit, Western Civilization values and history, along with STEM, all of that being done from pre-K through whatever degree level a student might pursue. And an elimination of professoriate opinion in the teaching of facts along with a strong demand for free and open debate on the meaning of those facts, a debate informed solely by logic and additional facts.

And at least as critically, the active participation of parents in the raising of our children and in their education. Schools cannot, profitably for the weal of our nation, be treated as babysitters, child care centers, or even ex loco parentis facilities.

Why So Slow?

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The  International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran hasn’t been cooperating with inspection efforts and that it has continued to greatly enrich uranium, increasing its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February. That’s enough to produce 10 nuclear warheads. That compares with my estimate of the number of nuclear bombs that, if used and they worked, would destroy Israel as a nation and as a people: 4-5.

It would take only two weeks to enrich those ~400kg to the 90% purity needed to make a nuclear warhead.

The slowness problem as I see it:

The IAEA has said it can’t verify that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

And

The report is an important steppingstone in the European powers threat to reimpose the sanctions lifted from Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal.
…
European diplomats have said if Iran failed to cooperate with the agency, they would follow up Saturday’s report with a push to declare Iran in noncompliance with its obligations as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. …
A noncompliance resolution could be voted on at the coming meeting of the IAEA board of member states, which starts June 9.

And this bit of unconscionable dithering:

European officials have said they will decide by the summer whether to press ahead with the so-called snapback of sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council, if Tehran doesn’t start to fully cooperate with the nuclear probe. The option of reimposing the sanctions expires in October under the 2015 agreement.

9 June is a week off—half the time Iran would need to produce nuclear warheads. Then the European government men and women will dither and hem and haw through the summer before they think about taking action—and that predicated on whether Iran merely begins to cooperate. Then these Wonders would go argue the matter at the UN, knowing full well that the Security Council doesn’t have the votes among the veto-capable members. And: even were sanctions snapped back via a miraculous Security Council decision, it would take days to weeks to implement them, and it would take months for them to start to interfere with the Iranian economy—while never reaching the impact level necessary actually to stop enrichment and production.

Keep in mind these two things, also: the Iranian government men have sworn to destroy—exterminate—Israel, and those government men care not a single dinar about their own people; sanctions won’t be a practical impediment.

Time is nearly up. Iran needs to receive a kinetic elimination of its nuclear weapons development program, and it needs to receive it promptly.

Cynicism…

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…is alive and well in California. This is illustrated by the California Interscholastic Federation’s decision to increase the number of girls eligible to participate in State high school athletic tournaments while continuing to allow biological males—boys—to participate in those same girls’ tournaments.

[A]ny biological female student-athlete who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their Section’s automatic qualifying entries in the CIF State meet, and did not achieve the CIF State at-large mark in the finals at their Section meet, was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships[.]

Tl;dr translation: any girl who lost to a boy in an earlier stage of the competition will be granted the opportunity to compete and lose again to the same boy in the next stage.

The cynicism is made explicit by this remark by California’s Progressive-Democrat Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon:

CIF’s proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness—a model worth pursuing.

No. There’s nothing respectful, reasonable, or fair in allowing boys to participate in girls’ sports.

The Biden Coverup

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What’s to be done about those who participated in the coverup? How do we hold them accountable—and by accountable, I mean how do we see them suitably and publicly punished?

The press’ complicity in the coverup is well known by all of us not already in thrall to their writings and television natterings. Most of us have learned to take their words skeptically, and we’ve moved on to other news and commentary sources, newer and perhaps no more trustworthy, but that’s yet to be demonstrated.

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians, though—they’re another matter. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the only Party member willing to expose the emperor was the back bencher Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who openly campaigned for President late in Party’s primary Potemkin contest on the premise that Biden wasn’t up to another four years either physically or mentally. Party castigated him as a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. Then, in a remarkable—and instructive—demonstration of Party’s dedication to democratic elections and to democracy of any form, Party canceled altogether their sham primary and pronounced by fiat Kamala Harris its candidate.

Party politicians other than Phillips contributed to the coverup of Biden’s growing mental incompetence either directly through their pronouncements of his fitness or indirectly through their studied silence on Biden’s capacities.

In sum, Party politicians openly lied to us citizens, and as the WSJ also put it, they denied the American people a better presidential choice, or at least in the eyes of some 77 million of us, a better alternative candidate for the office. They denied even their own voters the opportunity to choose a better alternative.

Party and Party politicians lied to all of us about so foundational a matter as who will lead our nation in its time of peril, who will exercise American influence around the world on matters central to our economic and political national security.

If Party politicians are willing to lie to us—have lied to us—about such a basic matter, what else will they lie to us about if reelected to their existing offices, or worse, if reelected to majorities in the House and Senate and in the White House?