Medicaid Transfers

Posted on 31 May 2017 by eehines

It’s well understood that Medicaid badly wants reform. My own view is to give it back to the States by reducing Federal fund transfers to them until the transfers are zero, which also would eliminate Federal strings jerking the States to do everything the same way, the Federal way.

There are lots of paths to that end, and there are a number of other reforms that would help the situation at least a little. The House plan for repeal and replace of Obamacare, the first step of which was the American Health Care Act, has one such step, the repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

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Disingenuosity

Posted on 30 May 2017 by eehines

At the State level, more and more legislatures are succeeding in ceasing to send taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood recently announced the shuttering of four of its 12 Iowa’s clinics in Iowa [sic] after the Hawkeye state’s Republican-led legislature voted earlier this year to cut funding to clinics that performed abortions. Also last week, the health care nonprofit announced it was closing its only clinic in Wyoming and three of its clinics in New Mexico in what it called a “realignment of resources.”

This is a preview of Disingenuosity. Read the full post (355 words, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)

Progressive Education

Posted on 24 May 2017 by eehines

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Sunday in which it extolled Los Angeles voters for elected a majority to the Los Angeles Unified School District school board that openly favored charter schools and the independence of those charters. The WSJ also described the hysteria with which the teachers unions and the ousted school board vilified these folks who so favored actually educating the city’s children over being a jobs factory for disinterested teachers and piggy bank for union coffers.

This is a preview of Progressive Education. Read the full post (306 words, estimated 1:13 mins reading time)

It Just Keeps Getting Better and Better

Posted on 18 May 2017 by eehines

…or worse and worse, depending on your perspective. Not only is the Veterans Administration continuing to make bad/false/improper payments, they seem to be getting acceleratingly worse about it. The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General reported that the VA made $5 billion in “improper” payments in 2015, and then while that drew attention, the VA increased their improper payouts to $5.5 billion in 2016.

To show how terrible the rates can be, here are some data from James Clark at the above link:

the VA Community Care had 75% of their payments as “improper” payments in 2016

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Stuff

Posted on 17 May 2017 by eehines

Now The New York Times is jumping on the bandwagon. The paper is claiming that a James Comey memo has it that President Donald Trump interfered with Comey’s investigation of Trump’s ex-NSA advisor, Mike Flynn. The following is based heavily on a comment I posted on Grim’s Hall.

First, the paper doesn’t have the memo; it was read to them. By a deliberately unidentified source. If the memo exists. If the reader exists.

This is a preview of Stuff. Read the full post (515 words, estimated 2:04 mins reading time)

Payback

Posted on 16 May 2017 by eehines

Recall that when President Donald Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, he allowed Russian photographers to take pictures but not photographers from the American NLMSM.

Now the Washington Post is claiming that President Trump “revealed highly classified information to [the] Russian foreign minister and ambassador” in that Oval Office meeting.

What’s being ignored in the manufactured hysteria over this is that WaPo very carefully used only anonymous sources for their claims: current and former US officials and officials and a US official familiar with the matter and a former senior US official and an official with knowledge of the exchange and a former senior US counterterrorism official and [a] former intelligence official and on and on.

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YGTBSM

Posted on 9 May 2017 by eehines

…again. Grant High School history teacher David Lickey wrote an essay and distributed it to the school’s students and teachers. In it, he wrote

“I find assertions of rape culture dubious,” and “The very wording of ‘rape culture’ seems to me a bit hysterical.”

And

“Rape culture” is a theoretical construct that is ill defined. What exactly is “rape culture?” I don’t see it in my life or the lives of any of the men and women I have known. I have never met a person who believes rape is anything other than a heinous crime.

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FGM

Posted on 1 May 2017 by eehines

This piece will be, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it,

disturbing but it is crucial that we speak openly about what is taking place rather than shroud it in euphemism so as not to cause offence.

This piece is about female genital mutilation, the deliberate butchery of a woman’s—even a five-year-old little girl’s—genitalia for the woman’s, the child’s, own good. And for the egos of the men of Islam who approve and perpetrate this atrocity.

This is, in Hirsi Ali’s plain language, what female mutilation truly is, in order from the “mildest” version to the outright butchery form:

This is a preview of FGM. Read the full post (618 words, estimated 2:28 mins reading time)

A Necessary Bill

Posted on 30 April 2017 by eehines

A congressional bill named for Taylor, the Taylor Force Act, would cut off the US aid [to the Palestinian Authority] unless the Palestinian Authority stops the payments.

Taylor Force was an Afghan and Iraq war vet who was visiting Tel Aviv when he was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist—and the terrorist’s family is getting a PA annual pension in celebration of his crime.

This bill is necessary. Money is fungible. These transfers, these so-named “aid” transfers, must be cut off entirely; it would be insufficient merely to forbid the transfers’ use for payments to terrorists’ families. The money’s existence would enable the PA to reallocate money from other sources to the “pensions” without reduction in overall PA income.

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A Democrat’s Disagreement

Posted on 18 April 2017 by eehines

During the recent debate in the Arizona legislature concerning a bill that would allow school vouchers for all Arizona children, Democratic Congressman Jesus Rubalcava wrote on his Facebook page that he wanted to throat-punch one of the sponsors of the bill, Republican Senator Debbie Lesko. The Arizona Republic captured a screen shot of Rubalcava’s Facebook post:

After Rubalcava’s post began circulating, after the ensuing uproar over his threat of violence against someone impertinent enough to disagree with him, he deleted his post (but not before the Republic had captured that screen shot) and apologized to Lesko.

This is a preview of A Democrat’s Disagreement. Read the full post (378 words, 1 image, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)

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Category Archives: morality